Part 2: The Myth of the Agent Provocateur Woman

If it is understood that the dominant discourse still pertains to heterosexual and patriarchal ideologies, Agent Provocateur was certainly aiming to challenge this in 2008. The brochure for their Spring/Summer collection that year contains many examples of non-heteronormative behaviour.

A model in a swimming costume and stilettos stands in front of a seated, similarly attired woman, who touches her leg and looks up to her. Two women in satin lingerie and high heels are seen walking together – one has her hand on the other’s buttocks. A woman in animal print lingerie brandishes a spanking paddle and leans over an anonymous prostrate naked woman, whilst holding a rope that is attached to the submissive woman’s neck like a leash. An anonymous red-haired woman straddles a seated gasping woman whose arm is being stroked by a blonde in lingerie, brandishing a riding crop. Another woman, who is standing with her legs apart and her hands on her hips, watches an athletic female pole dancer. A topless woman in a red wig climbs on top of a woman in lingerie who lies, restrained, on a table.

There are also many examples of dominant female behaviour. Two women in bright coloured wigs and lingerie tie up and blindfold a clothed man on his knees. A man in underwear stands, with hands tied behind his back, displaying marks on his chest that suggest he has been struck by the riding crop held by the woman to his left. A handcuffed man is disrobed by a woman, whilst another woman records the scene using a professional video camera. A man lying restrained on a table, has his trousers unzipped by a lingerie-clad woman who is holding a glass of brandy and is staring directly at the viewer.

In this image, the Agent Provocateur woman is powerful yet playful. She is passionate, determined to satisfy her own desires and, from the facial expressions depicted, is clearly enjoying herself. She is active, not passive, and has agency.

However, in the 2012 brochure, the Agent Provocateur woman appears to have little or no agency. She faces the camera as if directed to by the photographer and is entirely the subject of the gaze – continually watching herself. This appears to be a return to the woman John Berger describes in Ways of Seeing:

She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life.

There is little or no resistance to dominant discourses in the images contained within this brochure. All of the women appear sexually available, but are inviting sex rather than pursuing it. A woman stands in lingerie and heels next to a similarly attired seated woman, both facing the viewer with their legs apart. A woman kneels on a velvet chair, glancing over her shoulder at the viewer, with her buttocks prominently displayed. A woman in lingerie reclines on a chaise longue. A seated woman with her legs apart, hand on hip, stares at the viewer. There is no interaction between these women, even when more than one appears in the same image. Their only purpose is to invite the viewer’s gaze.

Christian Jantzen and others conducted a series of interviews with white middle class women in Denmark. The results suggested that these women wear delicate lingerie in order to achieve a sensation rather than a look. They wear it for how it makes them feel – confident, sensual, happy and satisfied – not necessarily for how they will be perceived by their partner. Some of the interviewees even admitted that the men in their lives do not understand their desire for exquisite lingerie. For them, the purchase and wearing of beautiful expensive underwear is about much more than just sex. It is about identity, pleasure, knowing how to dress for the right occasion, and, occasionally, projecting a desired alternate self-image:

The importance of lingerie to most of our respondents is due to the fact that this kind of garment enables them to demonstrate that they can manage a modern femininity. By adhering to a certain scheme of classification, they show how they master their performance in different situations. This confirms their social self.

Their research suggests that presenting lingerie as something to be enjoyed by the viewer rather than the wearer would not appeal to women. Even if this is not always true of women outside of their small study sample, I would argue that the current representation of the Agent Provocateur woman would therefore not appeal to the customer the brand originally sought to attract.

To conclude, the Agent Provocateur woman’s identity is, like the identity of every woman, shaped by discourse and the ideologies she is exposed to. If the woman is surrounded by, and part of, discourse which challenges what is currently dominant, she will herself become part of a reverse discourse. Agent Provocateur was originally conceived by Corré and Rees as a celebration of femininity, and the initial representation of the Agent Provocateur woman emphasised the performativity of her gender and her rejection of the patriarchal ideologies so often present in lingerie advertising.

Although the association between Agent Provocateur lingerie and this playfully erotic yet not passive lifestyle is purely arbitrary, it was exceedingly easy for customers to see the brand’s values and decide whether or not they wished to adopt them. Through the act of putting on this particular brand of quality exotic lingerie, a customer would create her sense of self, create her gender and transform her life into that of the Agent Provocateur woman. All of this was successfully conveyed in the promotional images and advertising for the brand up until at least 2008.

In looking at the differences between the images used to promote the Spring/Summer 2008 collection and those of the Autumn/Winter 2012 collection, it could be argued that the sale of the brand to a multinational company had an effect on how the Agent Provocateur woman was represented. The brand’s ideal woman appears to now offer far less resistance to current discourses on gender, sexuality and femininity than she did when Corré and Rees first sought to use lingerie as a way to disrupt and question the fashion status quo.

In expanding the market for the brand, the new owners appear to be attempting to create erotic lingerie that does not offend, thus diluting the original ethos of Agent Provocateur. Perhaps it is the current discourse which has changed, or maybe the Agent Provocateur woman simply works with the current discourse rather than against it? However, it could also be claimed that what is considered to be erotic is entirely subjective.

• Lori Smith is a rant-lite feminist who enjoys turning her thoughts into word form and then throwing them at the internet to see what sticks. She does this on a regular basis over at Rarely Wears Lipstick, and has previously contributed to The F-Word under her Sunday name.

Part 1: Agent Provocateur, Discourse and Performativity

In 1971, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren set up ‘Let it Rock’, their first King’s Road boutique. Their son Joseph Corré followed in his parents’ footsteps and opened a shop in London with his wife Serena Rees in 1994. Named Agent Provocateur, the unusual boutique bridged a gap between the erotic lingerie sold in Soho’s sex shops and the respectable prettiness of the established quality brands sold in department stores.

Corré and Rees saw the brand as a vehicle for their creativity and their ideas about women and femininity. In 1995, they began a search for a woman who ‘would represent the concepts behind the clothes, model new designs, and be a spokesperson at upcoming events’. They saw the face of their brand as ‘charming, glamorous, curvy, independent and intelligent’ (see Agent Provocateur: A Celebration of Femininity).

The finalists of their competition were used as part of a publicity stunt at London Fashion Week, staging a demonstration against bland passionless fashion that drew the attention of the assembled press. After a decadent Miss Agent Provocateur Party had been held, where the winner was announced, Corré and Rees realised that a single woman couldn’t represent their brand’s values as the concept was too diverse. Every woman has the potential to become an agent provocateur.

Corré and Rees have since divorced, and in 2007, Agent Provocateur was purchased by 3i Group. This gradually led to a significant change in how the Agent Provocateur woman was represented in the brand’s advertising campaigns. The brochure to showcase the Spring/Summer 2008 collection retained a lot of the ethos of Corré and Rees’ original vision. It has a cover designed to look like an invitation to an exclusive party, featuring the text ‘you are cordially invited to attend a very private affair […] Bring a blindfold and an open mind!’. Each image inside forms part of a digitally-created montage, with the pages containing small parts of the panoramic whole, unfolding to reveal one uninterrupted tableau.

The models are depicted as attendees of the party and are engaging in activities of a sexual nature. Nothing pornographic is depicted, merely hints of erotic and light BDSM play. Most of the party guests are women, clothed in Agent Provocateur lingerie and swimwear, but there are also a number of men in the image. The women take both dominant and submissive roles, whilst the men are purely submissive.

Product information about the lingerie sets featured, such as name and price, is listed on the back of the image. With this choice of layout, it could be argued that the images are designed to be enjoyed first, and to be informative second.

By contrast, the Autumn/Winter 2012 collection is presented in a brochure containing separate images for each named set of lingerie, with the product details directly underneath each photograph. The theme of the collection is ‘Wilhelmina: Show Your True Self’ and the associated campaign focuses on a woman in Victorian London whose inner sensuality is revealed by a backstreet photographer’s magical camera.

Each image contains between one and three female models, with little or no interaction between them. The women are not engaged in any activity other than modelling the clothing for the viewer, and are, as such, passive subjects of the gaze. Hair and make up is consistent throughout and maintains the look of a catwalk show, where the models are presented as a homogenous entity – a representation of how the brand’s woman should physically embody that season’s look.

Each model’s ‘true self’ appears to be no different from the others. This presents us with a single type of Agent Provocateur woman, as opposed to the idea that she is present in all women, as Corré envisioned seventeen years previously.

It has often been suggested that the female body in lingerie is more erotic than the nude female body. Roland Barthes touches on this in his essay on striptease, published in Mythologies:

Woman is desexualized at the very moment when she is stripped naked. We may therefore say that we are dealing in a sense with a spectacle based on fear, or rather on the pretence of fear, as if eroticism here went no further than a sort of delicious terror, whose ritual signs have only to be announced to evoke at once the idea of sex and its conjuration.

At the very heart of the original concept of the Agent Provocateur brand, when it was founded by Corré and Rees, was the idea of lingerie as a ritual sign which evoked the idea of sex. Although they sought to design underwear which referenced socially acceptable quality French lingerie, eroticism was very much a part of Agent Provocateur’s core values. They made the brand accessible to women who would not normally venture into sex shops to purchase erotic lingerie.

It could be argued that Corré and Rees were also responding to dominant discourse on sexuality and gender when they set up Agent Provocateur in the 1990s. In The History of Sexuality Volume 1, Michel Foucault analyses changes in discourse on sexuality and argues that discourse is a productive force; for example, leading to definitions of “normal” and “other”. He also looks at the concept of docile bodies versus active agency, discussing reverse discourse as an empowering method of countering the dominant discourse.

There is little doubt that Agent Provocateur – whose name refers to an undercover agent employed to provoke suspects to commit illegal punishable acts – originally sought to engage in a reverse discourse on female sexuality. In The History of Sexuality Volume 2, Foucault delves further and discusses what he calls ‘techniques of the self’, emphasising the role of practices and instruments in generating a sense of self.

Clothing is very much a ‘technique of the self’. People use their clothes to transform, change and project a chosen image on a daily basis. Although society still often restricts the individual’s choice of outerwear, unseen underwear offers the wearer a sense of agency. Lingerie is considered by many to be an instrument in generating a sense of self, and it is worth considering here that the self is also shaped by gender.

It is widely understood that gender is a cultural construction that is shaped by discursive forces. One of the main issues considered by Judith Butler is the performativity of gender. Gender is not a performance – as that suggests the performer returns to a more genuine self once they leave the stage – but it is performative, as we are all constantly putting on an act. Lingerie is but one aspect of the act of femininity.

Because there is neither an “essence” that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires, and because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all.

– Judith Butler

Therefore, what could possibly be more “womanly” than dressing oneself up in Agent Provocateur lingerie? In Gender Trouble, Butler explores the spaces of resistance to dominant discourses. Like Foucault, and with reference to his work, she asks how we can go beyond the boundaries imposed on us by discourse, and explores the concept of agency. Gender and identity are more of a “doing” than a “becoming”, and are constantly shaped by discourse. Like any woman, the Agent Provocateur woman’s identity is fluid. She is constantly made and remade by the forces around her.

• Lori Smith is a rant-lite feminist who enjoys turning her thoughts into word form and then throwing them at the internet to see what sticks. She does this on a regular basis over at Rarely Wears Lipstick, and has previously contributed to The F-Word under her Sunday name.
• Pop back tomorrow for Part 2 of Lori’s reflections.