Alistair O’Neill's London: After a Fashion is a concise yet complex book that traces an alternate path through the visual and material cultures of fashionable twentieth-century London. By necessity, much of this book is about the relationship between modernity and fashion in specific geographic locales, but beyond this simple description, O’Neill artfully forges an eclectic trajectory through primary and secondary material in search of an account overlooked by, or perhaps hidden beneath, official histories of fashion in the capital. His methodology and research are well grounded and far ranging, drawing from the diverse areas of material culture studies, cultural geography, and sociology, to name a few, as well as using the primary and secondary literary and artistic criticism of various decades in a mutually informing and inflected way.

As with the best works in cultural studies, which are truly interdisciplinary in nature, the potential grazing of surfaces and fragmentation of structures are balanced by a solid theoretical approach; one of the key strengths of O’Neill's book is that he successfully carries out his intentions as clearly stated in his introduction. He compares the eye-level, “soft” attributes of a city (as defined by Jonathan Raban in his 1974 text Soft City) as different from a highly structured, and logically mapped, bird's-eye view of the city. This “soft” eye-level view of a city, based on visceral experience and fragmented geographical pathways, is contrasted with the quite different official view informed by a semiabstracted understanding of metropolitan and topographical structures. O’Neill correctly claims that a large proportion of writing on London fashion has presented a “totalizing vision of a bird's eye view, with little regard for understanding it as a situated practice at eye level” (19). In answer to this, O’Neill proposes an approach to cultural mapping that uses key historical moments, locations, and individual biographies able to illuminate an alternate and more nuanced history of London fashion.

The book's structure echoes this theoretical premise, tracing a lineage of patterns, structures, and geographic locales that connect fashionable moments in the history of London and their temporal mapping through the shifting lens of fashion's focus on bodies in specific locations at given times. The book is broken into eight chapters, each prefaced by a fragment of a street map that corresponds to the area under discussion. Loosely chronological, each chapter examines specific historical moments in a way that opens up a consideration of fashion in light of relevant themes, most of them implicating modernity, consumerism, and/or phenomenology in some way. Clearly interested in material culture, O’Neill adeptly locates objects, images, and individual bodily practices such as tattooing, performance, or even shopping, geographically and spatially.

In chapter 1, themes of exoticism are played out through an examination of the upper- and middle-class fascination with tattooing in the West End in the late nineteenth century. Connecting this with the next chapter on Lady Duff Gordon's design label, Lucile, is the acknowledgment of the importance of the female body as a site of fashionability and communication. From here, issues of decadence and the commodification of the female body as a bearer of meaning lead to a chapter on gender and Surrealism in the 1930s. The self-crafting of artistic personas links this chapter with the next, which centers on the practices and self-presentation of Francis Bacon. Situated in postwar Soho, a “sordid and stained form of attire” reveals a contempt for fashion that is both telling and historically relevant (23). Remaining in Soho, but focusing on the recuperation of fashion by the entrepreneur John Stephens, in chapter 5, O’Neill reconfigures the accepted view of Carnaby Street as the heart of the “swinging sixties” and focuses instead on the importance of consumerism and retail spaces in this transformation of fashionable identities. The downfall of Carnaby Street and the rise of punk in the King's Road in the 1970s are traced through a reexamination of specific aspects of retail practices that, in seeming opposition to their very mandate, create a critical space that addresses the nature of consumerism itself. Chapters 7 and 8 each deal with opposing responses to the commercial vagaries of fashion. Chapter 7 deals with the gentrification of Chelsea and Covent Garden, and the importance of chintz in the marketing of a revitalized view of London as a garden city. Contrasting this attempt to ameliorate the effects of urban squalor, O’Neill's final chapter focuses on the East End and the recuperative strategies of finding new and ingenious approaches to fashion amid a wasteland, where inertia and ambivalence can be recast as a strategy for resisting the speed and pace of the city and indeed of fashion itself.

The book is a dizzying escapade through moments and experiences of fashionability in the capital. It succeeds at producing an alternate experience of history, yet it is the very thing that makes this book so successful and that provides the greatest challenges in its use by other scholars. Its wide-ranging and theoretically sophisticated amalgamation of various approaches and thinkers (from Walter Benjamin to George Simmel to Pierre Bourdieu) is intuitive and incisive, but also frustrating at times, requiring an endless relay of sources to their original locations, particularly in the context of fashion. Similarly, arresting images of historical moments act as teasers; the brevity of O’Neill's prose and the expanse of time navigated require significant unpacking and historical contextualization in order to gain any cognitive distance, or even to get one's bearings. Yet this is perhaps his point, as well as the intended effect. My vantage point, my perspective, if you will, of this same history has been fundamentally shifted, and my experience of London will never again be the same. For this reason, I believe this book is both inspirational and provocative and should be of interest to anyone interested in the history of either British fashion or the cultural geography of London.