It all started with a dying star. A pulsar data graph that Joy Division’s Bernard Sumner fell in love with. The guitarist pulled the 1970 black and white graph by radio astronomer Harold Craft, which resembles digital mountain peaks, straight from the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy. A pulsar, the word a contraction of “pulsating star,” is one possible endpoint of a star’s life, much like a black hole.
Sumner and his band, fronted by pasty, melancholic genius Ian Curtis, delivered the image to graphic designer Peter Saville, who had recently started designing posters and record sleeves for the band’s label, Factory Records. Saville used it for the cover of the band’s debut album, inverting the colors and adding no identifying text. “They very astutely spotted this image as potentially a wonderfully enigmatic symbol for a record cover,” Saville explained in short documentary Data Visualization, Reinterpreted, and the artwork for Unknown Pleasures was born.
On June 15, 1979, the mysterious black and white artwork began decorating record store shelves, drawing in browsing customers. Sonically, Unknown Pleasures was a monumental achievement, one of the most important and influential rock albums of all time, putting Joy Division at the forefront of the post-punk movement.
Producer Martin Hannett took the music beyond the simple clanging fury of punk’s 1977 generation, embracing new technologies like electronic drums and experimenting with samples of someone eating chips, a flushing toilet, breaking glass, and an aerosol spraying in place of a hi-hat cymbal. Today, the album is heralded for its sparseness and ambience and considered an important link in the chain leading to the techno and electronic music that would blossom in the following decades.
But while prescient critics and fans foresaw the music’s enduring impact, hardly anyone anticipated the mammoth impact the album’s spartan cover art would have on 21st-century fashion design.
The iconic cover can be seen on streets and fashion runways, in closets and stores, and even inked indelibly on people’s bodies. “There is, without a doubt, a global cult around Unknown Pleasures and very much around this image,” Saville added in the documentary. The cover has become one of the most popular band tee designs ever, to the point of becoming a meme, and its ubiquity has spilled over into high fashion and streetwear.
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