Archive for the ‘fashion’ Category
By
Simon Sellars •
Apr 19th, 2008 •
Category:
David Cronenberg, Iain Sinclair, Lead Story, YouTube, fashion, features, film, science fiction
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.
By
Simon Sellars •
Feb 3rd, 2008 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, Shanghai, architecture, audio, consumerism, fashion, photography, sexual politics, 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.
By
Simon Sellars •
Jan 15th, 2008 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, advertising, 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.
By
Simon Sellars •
Jan 11th, 2008 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, David Cronenberg, advertising, body horror, 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.
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, wait for it, 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 […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Oct 9th, 2007 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, advertising, 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 […]
By
Rick Poynor •
Mar 12th, 2007 •
Category:
Ballardosphere, David Cronenberg, William Burroughs, advertising, fashion, features, visual art
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 tests the […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Feb 28th, 2007 •
Category:
Philip K. Dick, Salvador Dali, advertising, boredom, consumerism, fashion, interviews, visual art
Interview by Simon Sellars
Rick McGrath is a writer and former adman (which explains the pithy insights to come). He’s 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 […]
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 […]
By
k-punk •
Sep 25th, 2006 •
Category:
Jean Baudrillard, William Burroughs, fashion, features, sexual politics, terrorism
‘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…
Welcome to our first guest post, hopefully the beginnings of a regular series in which we invite bloggers from far and wide […]
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”, the […]
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 […]
By
Simon Sellars •
Sep 5th, 2006 •
Category:
Salvador Dali, WWII, William Burroughs, 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, science fiction, sexual politics, space relics, speed & violence, surrealism, television, urban decay, visual art
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, published over the […]