Saville mentions that the first time he met Abloh, he expressed some bewilderment that there wasn't a greater youth resistance to fashion. 'Why aren’t we seeing some interesting young people saying no? Why aren't they all just walking around in blue and rejecting it? That kind of blew his mind.'

He's right – the cadence of consumption has increased exponentially over the past 40 years, and the techniques he pioneered have been and will continue to be corporately abused, in ever more insidious and inane ways. And there are real questions about how far this concept of nested referentiality can be pushed before it falls apart completely. But the question of how to save a society hellbent on consuming is bigger than any one discipline, and there is room here for optimism – designers like Abloh are also directing the teenagers who look up to them towards their own creative pursuits. Saville himself is a testament to the notion that it just takes one person with the right idea, on the right platform, at the right time to massively shift the course of visual culture.

... When a designer flips the logo of a international conglomerate, they’re making a joke, but they are also imagining a fictional world of scrambled power structures. These processes are now foundational tools for practitioners in all visual fields.

Peter Saville Wrote the Source Code by Adam Wray for SSense

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