Ballardian Glamour
By Simon Sellars • Dec 11th, 2008 •
Category: academia, Ballardosphere, fashion, sexual politics
Joanne McNeil on women characters in Ballard.
Archive for the ‘fashion’ Category
Crouching Pervert, Hidden Meisel
By Simon Sellars • Nov 18th, 2008 •
Category: Ballardosphere, censorship, death of affect, fashion, Italy, photography, sexual politics, Steven Meisel
Steven Meisel: rejected by Vogue Italia, embraced by ballardian.com.
Unique furniture of violence and desire
By Simon Sellars • Nov 17th, 2008 •
Category: Ballardosphere, fashion, flying, Interior design
At last: furniture for the Ballardian bachelor pad.
1971: Year of the Drake
By Simon Sellars • Apr 19th, 2008 •
Category: David Cronenberg, fashion, features, film, Iain Sinclair, Lead Story, science fiction, YouTube
Here’s a tribute to Gabrielle Drake, a co-conspirator of Ballard’s and the undisputed Queen of both outer and inner space. All hail 1971, the Year of the Drake.
Over to you…
By Simon Sellars • Feb 3rd, 2008 •
Category: architecture, Ballardosphere, consumerism, fashion, photography, sexual politics, Shanghai, speed & violence, surveillance, travel, urban revolt, visual art
This post is given over to recent links readers have sent me. ‘Ballardian’ or not? You decide.
Love among the mannequins
By Simon Sellars • Jan 15th, 2008 •
Category: advertising, Ballardosphere, body horror, consumerism, death of affect, fashion, visual art
Here’s a new campaign from fashion label Dsquared2, featuring sex with crash-test mannequins. But it doesn’t appear to be selling anything. What exactly *is* it selling? Note the photographer: none other than our old mucker, Steven Meisel.
'Accident' or 'Vulva'? The battle for your Ballardian dollar
By Simon Sellars • Jan 11th, 2008 •
Category: advertising, Ballardosphere, body horror, David Cronenberg, fashion, speed & violence
What’s more Ballardian? A fragrance for women patterned after the smell of burnt rubber, brake fluid and excrement? Or a scent designed to evoke the smell of a woman’s vagina? You decide.
Dead Models
By Simon Sellars • Oct 31st, 2007 •
Category: Ballardosphere, body horror, consumerism, fashion
Steve O. sent me a link to a photo shoot for America’s Next Top Model, on the subject of dead girls. It’s from March earlier this year, and even though seven months in the Ballardosphere is a very very long time, it still needs to be recorded. Steve writes, ‘I don’t know if this has [...]
'Mannequins Mauled in Store Wars': Best Headline Ever?
By Simon Sellars • Oct 9th, 2007 •
Category: advertising, Ballardosphere, consumerism, fashion, urban revolt
The shop mannequin and the crash-test dummy have always held a privileged place in Ballard’s fiction. Battered, broken and discarded, they housed the streaky veins of alienation and despair that marked The Atrocity Exhibition. Rendered with Ballard’s clinical, amoral gaze, they evoked the terminal stylisation wreaked by technology in Crash. Fused by nuclear radiation into [...]
Collapsing Bulkheads: the Covers of Crash
By Rick Poynor • Mar 12th, 2007 •
Category: advertising, Ballardosphere, David Cronenberg, fashion, features, visual art, William Burroughs
by Rick Poynor ‘Missing the point’: (detail, Livre de Poche edition, 1973; design: Atelier Pascal Vercken). NOTE: This is an edited version of an essay published in Designing Pornotopia: Travels in Visual Culture by Rick Poynor, Laurence King Publishing, 2006. First published in Eye no. 52, Summer 2004. Reproduced with permission. J. G. BALLARD’S Crash [...]
‘Woefully Underconceptualised’: Rick McGrath on J.G. Ballard’s Cover Art
By Simon Sellars • Feb 28th, 2007 •
Category: advertising, boredom, consumerism, fashion, interviews, Philip K. Dick, Salvador Dali, visual art
Interview by Simon Sellars Rick McGrath is a writer and former adman. He is also the curator of what may be the world’s largest collection of J.G. Ballard first editions; he’s the ‘go-to man’ whenever a TV station or glossy mag does a rare feature on Ballard and needs some book covers. Rick has written [...]
Lie Down with the Beast
By Simon Sellars • Dec 18th, 2006 •
Category: Ballardosphere, fashion, space relics
OK, I’m a few days late with this, but I just wanted to acknowledge my Super Snout, FJ Torres, who alerted me last week to the presence of Peter Lindbergh’s Future of Fashion spread in this month’s Harper’s Bazaar (FJ previously tipped me off about Steven Meisel’s Terror Porn antics). Ballard once wrote that “sex [...]
Fantasy Kits: Steven Meisel's State of Emergency
By k-punk • Sep 25th, 2006 •
Category: fashion, features, Jean Baudrillard, sexual politics, terrorism, William Burroughs
‘Obscene mannequins’. ‘Conceptual deaths’. The eroticisation of violence in the media landscape… the stunning ‘State of Emergency’ spread in the current Vogue Italia seems to come straight out of JG Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition… A few weeks ago, I asked whether it would be possible ‘for there to be a pornography, sponsored by Dior or Chanel, [...]
JGB's Sinister Marriage
By Simon Sellars • Sep 14th, 2006 •
Category: Australia, Ballardosphere, fashion, sexual politics, terrorism
Here’s a Vogue Italia photo shoot by Steven Meisel that posits supermodels as new-age terrorists (thanks for the link, FJ Torres). As Tim has already commented, “If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boot stamping on a supermodel’s throat forever.” Yes, it’s Ballardian. Yes, it’s JGB’s imagined “sinister marriage between sex and technology”, [...]
Inter-Porn Symp
By Simon Sellars • Sep 7th, 2006 •
Category: Ballardosphere, David Cronenberg, fashion, film, sexual politics
Over at k-punk a few months back, Mark posted a radical thesis that positioned Basic Instinct 2 as the unofficial sequel to Cronenberg/Ballard’s Crash: [Catherine] Tramell returns in the second film as a camp vamp whose persona owes more to Ballard than to film noir. Catherine is a name Ballard has often used, and Basic [...]
A User's Guide to the Millennium (1996)
By Simon Sellars • Sep 5th, 2006 •
Category: advertising, architecture, bibliography, boredom, celebrity culture, consumerism, death of affect, deep time, dystopia, enviro-disaster, fashion, film, flying, humour, invisible literature, media landscape, medical procedure, non-fiction, photography, politics, psychogeography, psychology, Salvador Dali, science fiction, sexual politics, space relics, speed & violence, surrealism, television, urban decay, visual art, William Burroughs, WWII
OPENING LINE: “In his prime the Hollywood screenwriter was one of the tragic figures of our age, evoking the special anguish that arises from feeling sorry for oneself while making large amounts of money”. (from ‘The Sweet Smell of Excess’). From the 1996 Harper Collins edition: The first-ever collection of J.G. Ballard’s articles and reviews, [...]
