ABSTRACT
In 1937 Vogue published a revealing article, ‘Shopping – then and now’. The article highlighted the spatiality of shopping within this account of transformation, particularly the mechanism of travelling to the West End for a 'day in town' and the pleasurable experience of the city's streets. This chapter explores these spatial concerns and examines how networks of fashionable consumption centring on the West End, and the configuration of shopping routes within the area, formed integral parts of both metropolitan fashion cultures and of conceptions of London as a shopping city, as represented and constructed in Vogue. It discusses the distinctive role of the West End in Vogue’s treatment of shopping: as a hub of fashionable consumption within British shopping geographies, and as the destination of pleasurable, purposeful shopping trips. The chapter utilizes the ‘Shop-hound’ shopping column to examine Vogue’s West End more closely, showing how its identity was constructed from different streets and routes.
