Off the Wall

Start with the suit, because Salisbury built everything around it. A classic black tuxedo, sharply tailored, sits over a crisp white shirt and a black bow tie tied a touch loose, the way someone wears formalwear that belongs to them rather than the other way around. The tuxedo is the whole argument of the image. It reads as a metaphor for maturity, the visual mark of Jackson stepping out from under his father's control and standing as his own star. Black and white against everything else makes the figure read instantly as adult, deliberate, arrived.

Then the wall. Jackson leans against plain red brick, the mortar lines running rough and irregular behind him, one hand tucked into his trouser pocket and the other resting easily at his side. It is a deliberately ordinary backdrop, and that ordinariness does the work. Formalwear set against bare brick keeps the elegance from stiffening into a studio portrait. He looks approachable and relaxed, a man who could stand anywhere and still command the spot.

The most decisive choice is the one that looks like an accident. The top of Jackson's head is cut off at the frame's edge. It is not sloppiness. The tight crop pulls attention straight down to the eyes, which meet yours directly, and to the wide, unguarded smile beneath them. Cover the top of the image with your hand and the effect is plain: without the crop you read the whole figure, with it you read the face. The framing forces the picture to be about a person rather than an outfit.

The hand-lettered type in the upper left leans into the same warmth. "MICHAEL JACKSON" and "OFF THE WALL" are rendered in loose, casual white script, with the words "OFF" and "WALL" each underlined by a quick stroke. Nothing about the lettering is corporate or rigid. It sits against the brick like a note scrawled by someone confident enough not to fuss over it, echoing the ease of the pose rather than announcing a product.

Colour is almost entirely warm, red brick filling the frame, so the eye has nowhere to wander except back to the face. The single interruption is at the right edge: a sliver of blue and green light, the only cool tones in an otherwise warm picture. It functions as a small release valve, a hint that there is a wider space beyond the wall, without ever competing with the figure.

Put the choices together and the image resolves into a single statement. The tuxedo supplies the maturity, the brick supplies the ease, the crop supplies the intimacy, and the lettering supplies the informality that keeps all of it human. A campfire and children's clothes would have kept Jackson small, a boy frozen in the frame that made him. Instead the tuxedo, the brick, and a crop that dares to slice off the top of his head say the opposite thing at once: here is a man, meet his eyes, he has already arrived.

The idea began as almost the reverse of what appears on the sleeve. An initial cover mock-up showed Jackson seated by a campfire in cowboy and children's clothes, which the creative director Mike Salisbury said looked like an advertisement for the children's department at Sears. He rejected it, and that rejection is why the finished image exists.

Salisbury, a branding specialist and creative director, had pursued Jackson after seeing him in The Wiz, contacting his agent and telling him that Jackson was going to be the biggest music star ever. What he wanted was maturity visible at a glance, Jackson presented the way you would see Frank Sinatra in a tuxedo in Vegas: a major person, not a former child act. He commissioned a fashion illustrator to draw the tuxedo concept, intending black and white as Jackson's brand mark. Jackson, listening from behind velvet drapes, approved the drawing and asked only to add white socks.

Several of the details were solutions to practical problems. Jackson was dressed in a women's tuxedo because he was too thin for a men's fit, and because men's tuxedos lacked the Yves Saint Laurent styling Salisbury wanted. The white socks, loafers and hiked pant legs were inspired by Gene Kelly showing off his footwork, evoking a young American abroad in An American in Paris.

The first attempt, shot at Griffith Observatory, failed to capture the desired attitude and forced a reshoot. The final frame used a loading-dock area dressed to feel like the backstage of a Broadway theatre. Photographer Stephen (Steve) Harvey shot the image in Los Angeles in 1979, working with Jackson and Salisbury, a collaboration later recounted in a full oral history by Andscape and in a PRINT Magazine interview on Salisbury's branding work.

Released on August 10, 1979, Off the Wall was Jackson's first album through Epic Records. Produced by Quincy Jones, it folded together pop, disco, funk, R&B, soul, soft rock and Broadway ballads, and it marked a clean break from his Motown past. The polished, grown-up figure on the sleeve matched the leap in the grooves.

Critics received the album as exactly what the sleeve promised, a breakthrough and a genuine departure from the Motown years, and it is now widely hailed as one of the greatest albums of all time. The numbers backed the image. Off the Wall made Jackson the first solo artist to send four Top 10 singles up the Billboard Hot 100 from a single album, and it has since sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. In 2008 it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Salisbury's instinct proved to be a working blueprint rather than flattery. The polished black-and-white style, the tuxedo silhouette and the poised elegance helped fuel Jackson's rise to superstardom and carried straight into his later work, appearing in videos such as "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" and "Billie Jean" and in his Motown 25 performance, and recurring across his solo career until his death in 2009. The look became shorthand for the artist himself. The cover established the tuxedo-with-white-socks combination as one of his trademarks, with manager John Branca commenting on the tuxedo styling, and it is celebrated as a landmark Black album cover, featured in The Root's "28 Days of Album Cover Blackness" series for the image of Jackson in his tuxedo and afro.

The cover eventually became confident enough to hide the star's face entirely. For the special-edition reissue on October 16, 2001, the front swapped the portrait for the original back-cover image: just the bottom half of Jackson's legs, socks and shined shoes. By then the tuxedo alone could carry the name. The eyes were no longer needed, because the whole world already knew whose they were.