Lacoste collaborate with Peter Saville French sports brand Lacoste has enlisted designer Peter Saville to reinterpret their crocodile logo for a range of polo shirts Peter Saville has created a series of limited edition polo shirts for Lacoste - 160 in total - on which he defaces the brand's famed crocodile logo. Saville, 57, is famed for his designs for Factory Records' vinyl sleeves; he's the man behind the pulsar radio waves on Joy Division's debut album Unknown Pleasures, and the appropriation of Henri Fantin-Latour's Roses painting for New Order's Power Corruption and Lies. For his latest trick he's contorted the Lacoste crocodile into 80 different guises to be reproduced on 80 shirts for women and 80 shirts for men, on sale on November 29 from £375 at lacoste.com . We caught up with Saville over a glass of Hennessy VSOP (in a tumbler, one chunk of ice) last night at London's Shoreditch House. What was the brief from Lacoste? The brief had been, 'Here's the shirt, do what you want, but don't touch the logo.' But of course that's the interesting thing to do. A brand like Lacoste is weirdly egalitarian - they're not exclusive. You could find kids in the favelas playing football in Lacoste polo shirts and you can go to a yacht party in them. It's a universal product. Is a Lacoste polo shirt upmarket or downmarket? It's neither - it just is. And on it is the crocodile. So it's interesting that you can take an icon like that and disrupt it. And actually it was fun. How did you set about messing up the logo? You can interrupt those paths of the digital file of the logo by running them through different filters. So you run the logo through the filters, changing the co-ordinates and seeing what happens. Sometimes they're really abstract and sometimes they're wonderfully aggressive, or funny, or insane. READ: Cartier puts a stop to parody branding How did Lacoste react when you revealed the distortions? Their first response was a big intake of breath - What has he done?! But the ones I had put on the table were funny, witty, and they smiled. They all looked at each other with a, 'Why not?' Then I had to meet Sophie Lacoste and tell her what I had done to her grandfather's crocodile. So I told her there was a tyranny of the crocodile in their office: they're all scared of this crocodile. For her grandfather, having a crocodile on his shirt was fun. I said that I wanted to put some fun back into the crocodile and she agreed. I also wanted to give some meaning to the notion of 'limited edition'. We've got 80 different crocodiles - can we produce just one shirt with one crocodile on it? So each one is unique, which I think is pretty cool. The whole project becomes an experimental challenge with the laws of brand. How would you feel if I nabbed one and put it on eBay? People will do that. But people who got them for themselves have a more valuable thing than the people who put them on eBay. Value at the moment is artificially created. There is an awful lot of temporary inflated value around things, which is the result of the machinery of promotion. Every season there is more and more effort pumped into suggesting that things are must-haves. READ: Archbishop Justin Welby: Fashion has emptied the Cross of its power Will we reach a tipping point? Totally. I reached it years ago. They're not must-haves at all. Mostly it's nonsense. I've just done a collection for Y-3. I called it 'Meaningless Excitement'. I was given carte blanche to comment on someone's fashion collection so I said, 'To me, this is meaningless excitement.' Yohji [Yamamoto] said, 'Thank you'. And that was the name of the collection. I try to retain a little bit of my founding credibility from Factory Records by only doing projects where I am allowed a degree of free speech. Is free speech the main criteria? Yeah, otherwise I devalue my own brand. So you're a brand too? My reputation is founded on me bringing what I thought was necessary to the everyday in the '70s and '80s. I was really disappointed and actually angry about the way things looked. And I wanted the everyday to be in a way more intelligent, more cultured, and to bring something to people. I had the freedom to demonstrate that idea through record covers. Now that use of the styles and codes of culture have been entirely appropriated to position product. The problem now is to navigate the forest of seductive signs. I do not wish to be a person putting up more of those signs. I am not interested in helping most companies sell things to people that they don't need. When someone comes to you with something that is genuine or brilliant you want to communicate it. But when people come to you with another spurious collection or film or handbag - what's the point? That's not helping anyone. This is like a tax on life. How do you stay true to your own brand with other brands? I closed my studio, ultimately. When you have 20 people working with you, you have to feed that with work. So I closed the studio. I do not have a burden of accountability each month. I don't have to do things that I don't think have any value. For the Lacoste shirt I wanted to give a disruption in this weird culture of brand obsession. I hate people talking about brands. Someone asked me the other day, 'What brands do you wear?' I don't wear brands. I wear clothes. This idea of wearing brands is terrible! But you've just described yourself as a brand. But I'm not asking people to wear me. A brand is a reputation, something you trust in. Once upon a time you bought a Mackintosh to keep you dry, not because you wanted to wear the brand Mackintosh. You are not a billboard. Of course, there are certain logos that make you feel better about yourself through the values that they impart to the object. The Chanel logo is a great logo, it always looks good on things. The Hermès logo looks good on things. There are these signs that please us - authenticity but also vanity. It's best when they're pleasing us and not being like a demonstration to others. Go through the learning curve to the point at which you're happy being who you are. And you don't need these other things.