Post-Apocalyptic Pin Ups

Some post-apocalyptic pin ups from FHM Magazine. Looks like the Apocalypse rocks.

Nuclearicious Fashion

These fashion photos with the title "Nuclearicious" in a nice post apocalyptic setting are by Paco Matteo Li Calzi.

Zombie Fashion

The American model and actress Devon Aoki by Nick Knight for Vogue Nippon. A nice Japanese zombie.

Trailer Trash

The actress Christina Rene Hendricks by the celebrity portraitist Sheryl Nields for Esquire September 2009. Hendricks is best known for her role as Joan Holloway in the television series Mad Men, but here she is shown as a kind of white trailer trash. Probably Nields loved the contrast of this glamorous Retro Marilyn with decay.

America’s Decay

This editorial was publishes by Vogue Korea in July 2008. It shows America in full decay. An abandoned motel and a gas station somewhere lost in the desert, kind of American dream. And probably an Asian romantic vision of the West.

Kind of Steampunk Fashion

Here the Brazilian model Bruna Tenorio was shot by the fashion photographer Geoff Barrenger for the Ports 1961 Fall Winter 2010 Ad Campaign.

She poses in an old factory 19th century style. It’s especially this kind of industrial decay which gave the photos that fashionable steampunk look.

Post Apocalyptic Fashion

A fantastic post apocalyptic Vogue editorial in Vogue Paris (September 2006) by Craig McDean.


Skinny models in the best Road Warrior look in an ambiance of industrial decay. That’s the combination to make a cool Vogue photo shoot.

Mad Bündchen

Gisele Bündchen posing as a female version of Mad Max for DT Magazine in october 2010. I think always if the post-apocalypse is so fashionable it must be a little more than the weird dream of a bunch of lunatics.

Terminator Styling

I stumbled upon this Dior advertising. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think that it’s possible to show an eye like this without quoting good old Arnold.
This red mechanical eye is already an icon, which was even quoted by the last Terminator film.

Dead Mermaids

The August 2010 issue of Vogue Italia published this editorial by Steven Meisel. Called "Water & Oil" reminds of the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf. Though it pretends to be critical it looks to me a lot more like an exploitation of the subject.

Anyway I appreciate a lot the cool style of Meisel’s photos and the quotation of the mermaid-subject. And there are his romantic roots, which seems much more important to him than this actual desaster.

Boring Gore

What a wonderful and splendid future the side effects of global warming have to offer shows one of the latest Diesel ad campaigns. Guys like the boring Al Gore seem completely wrong with their negative forecasts.

Rio de Janeiro is underwater but good looking people have still a lot of fun, on their yachts.

In flooded New York there is also nice weather, so that people use the rooftops of the skyscrapers for sunbathing.

Even foggy London became a tropical island.

With so much optimism I don’t wonder that already some new interpretations of this campaign can be found in the web. Like this one by dr4oz.

Fashion in Ruins

There are more than a few fashion photographers who exploit the contrast of beautiful well dressed models to industrial ruins and decay.



This series by the photographer Baldovino Barani was published in the South China Morning Post in the March issue 2008.

Post-Apocalyptic Fashion

This post-apocalyptic series is by the famous fashion photographer Steven Meisel and was published by Vogue Italia in September 2004.


The abandoned morbid scenery refers to a lot of post apocalyptic and zombie films, like for example "Resident Evil: Extinction" (2007) with Milla Jovovich. Jessica Stam the model poses like a dead victim or already as a zombie. I like Meisel because his dark humor.

Fashion and Decay

In the Vogue Italy appeared in June 2007 this editorial by the famous fashion photographer Steven Meisel (maybe my favourite).



It shows different models in the scenery of abandoned and derelict industrial architecture. Meisel likes this morbid atmosphere. To me he seems sometimes as a modern version of Thomas Cole, a late romantic ruin lover.

Fascinating Ruins

We see ruins nearly every day in the news and they have nothing charming or romantic. They tell us about disasters, loss and misery. Not long ago we’ve seen the devastations caused by the tsunami in Asia, a little later there could be seen the results of Hurricane Katrina and that of the great earthquake in China. And these natural disasters are reinforced by the frequently wars with their bombs and rockets, which are destroying with increasing regularity dreams, families and lives of so many people.


Survivors in front of ruins mourning their dead and their losses. These are the typical ruin images, with which we are confronted almost every day.

But on the other hand the web is full of sites devoted to ruins. It seems that there are a lot of people (me included) who are roaming through ruins, taking nice photos, which are presented like some of the most beautiful and enchanting places of the world.

Even worse these guys are no bunch of necrophilic perverts because they are not alone, they are part of a mass phenomenon. Some of the most successful movies, which produced Hollywood in the last decades, are using decay and ruins as sensational scenery.

And there are not only the movies. If you have a look on fantasy paintings and modern comics you will soon discover, that’s above all a good ruin setting which provides the spice in this kind of art.


Hollywood and comics merged into video games, and so it isn’t surprising at all, that ruins provide an important part of the scenery of the better games.

Ruins became so popular that there are even sites in internet offering tawdry ruins by the dozen as screensavers.

Maybe that someone will interpret this as a sign of bad taste inherent in any use of ruin images. I don’t think so, because ruins as symbolic décor have in fact infiltrated the very esthetical world of fashion and received in this way the higher consecrations of art.

This image by the fashion photographer David LaChapelle was first published in 2005 in the Vogue Italy and is now exhibited by the Helmut Newton Foundation in the exhibition "Men, War & Peace".

I hope to have demonstrated, that the fascination for ruins spreads over a great part of modern esthetics. With this blog I will try to show how ruins are used today in popular culture – i.e. photography, film, painting, comics, video games, fashion, architecture. Further I will investigate how the interpretation of ruins has changed over the course of history. This will be more a trip into art history because in older times there where neither movies nor video games. But I think that many of our modern concepts and opinions regarding ruins have their roots there.

And despite I’m no great photographer I fear that I cannot abstain from posting some of my own photos. Sure, nearly every day I stumble upon better ones in the web. But everybody finds his own ruins, has his own point of view, and because of that probably somebody will get an inspiration by my photos to visit some places.