The subtitle of Bettina Rheims’s Bonkers! A Fortnight in London announces a compressed encounter with the British capital. Models, actresses and other women appear amid the restless intervals between catwalks, concerts and parties. London is presented less as architecture or street geography than as a social atmosphere: mobile, nocturnal and knowingly eccentric.

Rather than offering a documentary survey, Rheims constructs a dark, theatrical realm around portraiture, fashion and performance. Accessories, costumes, provocative disguises and explicit nudity shift the subjects between public persona and private invention. The resulting photographs inhabit an unstable register—part fashion image, part erotic portrait, part collaborative play—in which display becomes a means of female expression rather than a fixed identity.

Vivienne Westwood’s contribution of fashion accessories and costumes gives the project a particularly London inflection. Her designs do not function simply as styling; within Rheims’s scenarios, they become props through which the women exaggerate, parody or redirect the codes of glamour. The book’s distinctive energy comes from this friction between fashion’s professional apparatus and the unruly performances staged with it.

Published by Steidl in 2014, Bonkers! also occupies a clear place within Rheims’s continuing photographic engagement with cities, following earlier attention to Paris and Shanghai. For collectors, its significance rests not on a comprehensive portrait of London but on the concentration of several recurring concerns in her work: constructed femininity, erotic self-presentation, celebrity culture and the boundary between portraiture and fashion. It is a focused record of a specific artistic collaboration and of London interpreted through bodies, clothes and performance.