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.

I quite like Agent Provocateur in general – while it’s a bit ridiculous in places (this may be many things, but it is not a ‘playsuit’), I do feel like it’s positively targeted at strong, empowered women who like luxury lingerie, and their partners (the Gentleman’s Guide for boyfriends on their website is quite amusing).

This may be because their creative director is herself a female force to be reckoned with: Sarah Shotton, who worked her way up the company from an ‘apprenticeship’ when it had just started up. Now at the top, Shotton states that she tries every design she looks at on a size 8 model and a size 16, to ensure that it works on a range of shapes. No more than she should do, perhaps, but probably still more than many other lingerie designers. So I’m on side from the get-go, really.

But to the ad!

H&M’s Winter 2012 campaign

First things first, this has got to be in the minority among lingerie campaigns in that the female protagonist is active and capable. She’s not in a boudoir and she’s not being sexy for an imagined (male) viewer. I present this from La Senza and this from the M&S ‘Autograph’ lingerie range for comparison.

For a more current spin, to my right is H&M’s Winter 2012 print campaign. Oh look, it’s another woman in lingerie on a bed (/ weird sheepskin shebang), lit so you can’t actually see her face. For a more avant garde take on these same ideas, check out this bizarre mini-film masterwork from Damaris. Damaris, I love you dearly, but seriously, what is this?

Conversely, in the Agent Provocateur advert our heroine is out and about, and about to get on a bus. She’s wearing a wrap dress and plimsoles – well-dressed, but clearly not on any kind of Special Sexy Trip – and she also just happens to be wearing matching Agent Provocateur lingerie.

One effect of this decision is to make the underwear look practical. This is not true of most of Agent Provocateur’s range (or price tag). They’ve always been really into the idea of lingerie as a ‘special secret’ (not Victoria’s).

The photography on their website is lit as if by searchlight to reinforce this, and this advert refines that a little, pushing lingerie as a secret just for you, the wearer. But, they’re arguing here, it’s also something viable for every day. Our protagonist is just hangin’ out in her designer lingerie, because she wants to wear it – for herself.

Personally, I commend her: good underwear is the skeleton of an outfit, and I don’t see why, if you’re lucky enough to be able to buy luxury lingerie, it should have to languish at the bottom of a drawer until some performative Special Occasion.

But I think this ad – and its slogan, ‘sexy never takes a day off’ – is also saying that there’s something almost intrinsic about ‘sexy’. In this advert, the Agent Provocateur underwear, and the choice to wear it out and about, is just an extension of the heroine’s natural confidence and, well, sexiness.

It’s this confidence that makes her actually embark on the chase in the first place. The underwear’s not making her sexy; she’s chosen the underwear because she already is sexy. Typical advertising, of course, but isn’t it better to see someone being sexy in their day to day life than backlit in a studio, lounging on a bed?

I wanted to include it because the responses I’ve been getting to it have been quite wide ranging. So, the story begins with that bastion of the High Street Sex Shops, Ann Summers, of whom I have always been reasonably supportive, despite their addiction to itchy lace and the colour pink.

Why do I like them? Because in a world where sex, especially female participation and enjoyment is still taboo, this is a store that unashamedly caters to women and makes sex toys understandable, fun and available.

Together with the revolutionary Ann Summers parties, which are still going today, it provides safe adult sexual education away from schools or the XXX signage of the sleazy, intimidating stores of old. You can still find those stores in some parts of Soho, if you fancy something retro. Pack your own mac.

I love Lucy!

Anyway, Ann Summers ran a modelling competion, and now their windows are full of the image above. The winner, in the middle, is Lucy from Portsmouth. The vote was public and Lucy secured enough votes from whoever votes in public modelling competitions. The general public, I guess, which means that the general public have a very different, and arguably more representational, view of what a sexy woman looks like compared with the usual imagery.

I like the fact that Lucy is a size 16 (I believe that would be just about an ‘average’ size, right?). I like that she has won something she wants to win, that she is smiling and happy and confident. Part of feminism is about being able to look sexy and to enjoy looking sexy – without being called a slut, and without feeling as if you need to starve yourself to death. In which case, hurrah for Lucy!

I don’t know whether I love Lucy, I’m conflicted!

But part of me, perhaps a churlish and mean spirited part, wishes she’d won something else. Something where she kept her clothes on. Something that wasn’t about a narrow definiton of sexiness as standing around in red and black underwear for men to gawp at you.

I don’t like the idea of model competitions full stop – the whole idea that there are winners and losers in a world of body standards. There are too many women, too many shapes of their bodies, for there to be ‘correct’ ones. Sexiness isn’t about size. And this makes it about size. It makes it about “skinny” and “fat” – which is that Marilyn meme all over again, frankly.

Maybe I do love Lucy!

Yet there she is. On the high street. In a shop which is for women. And most of the women I talked to about this thought it was amazing, and when I put my objections about the sexualisation of women to them, they pointed out that this was Ann Summers, which is a sex shop, dammit, and that it was like me complaining that there were chocolates in Thorntons. They had a point. As did all of my friends who do like sexy, lacy (even pink) underwear.

I don’t know, I really don’t. Over to you…

K

KNICKERBOCKER

“I should say that a walking suit in which one could not walk, and a winter suit which exposes the throat, head, and feet to cold and damp, was rather a failure,” said Dr. Alec [who had his own ideas about what his niece should be wearing.]

“Alec, if it is a Bloomer, I shall protest. I’ve been expecting it, but I know I cannot bear to see that pretty child sacrificed to your wild ideas of health. Tell me it isn’t a Bloomer!” and Mrs. Clara clasped her hands imploringly.

Louisa May Alcott, Eight Cousins (1875)

Nope, a knickerbocker. This is a strange word, with an uncertain trajectory from immigration to ladies’ unmentionables, and its progress will here be followed with a suitably bifurcated approach: one leg underwear and one leg outerwear. We meet in the middle.

Work it. A Bloomer from the 1850s.

The word’s first appearance is in capitalised form: Knickerbocker is the name given to ‘a descendent of the original Dutch settlers of the New Netherlands in America; hence, a New Yorker’ – the New ‘Netherlands’ becoming, of course, New ‘York’ after the English got their grubby hands on it.

The everyday appearance of the term must be attributed to Washington Irving’s 1848 History of New York, purported to have been written by one ‘Diedrich Knickerbocker’. A long chain, this name was appropriated from Irving’s pal Herman of the same name, who was in turn descended from Harmen Jansen Knickerbocker (c.1650-1720), one of the original Dutch settlers, who supposedly invented the name. Awesome.

But where are the unmentionables?

It’s Over.

These appear in the second sense of the word, a development on the first, from 1859, where it is pluralised to knickerbockers – ‘Loose-fitting breeches, gathered in at the knee; also extended to the whole costume worn with this’. Irving is once again lurking around, because this usage is said to refer to George Cruikshank’s illustrations of the same opus. Knickerbockers wear knickerbockers. Duh.

These ‘loose-fitting breeches gathered at the knee’ became, in another life, standard wear for little boys, whose breeching (the graduation to trousers) consequently became a coming-of-age moment. Short trousers, of course, facilitated easy, boisterous movement, and in Eight Cousins, quoted above, the incorrigibly fashionable Aunt Clara resents her little niece, Rose, wearing such loose-fitting bifurcated garments: ‘Dress her in that boyish way and she will act like a boy. I do hate all these inventions of strong-minded women!’

So Knickerbockers were not simply a New York trend: they were part of sartorial gender differentiation. Little girls wear restrictive petticoats to keep them ladylike; those boys who have graduated from their baby-skirts wear garments that allow them to be as boyish as necessary. It is no coincidence that, in their modern incarnation, knickerbockers are kept firmly in the domain of sportswear.

Bloomin’ ‘Eck

Cartoon from Punch, 1895.

The ‘Bloomers’ Aunt Clara has such a horror of were the pet project of another Knickerbocker. In the 1850s, Miss Amelia Bloomer, from Cortland County, New York, began a crusade to popularise the ‘Bloomer suit’, not her own invention, but eventually synonymous with her name. This was an Eastern-inspired way to wear your skirt: shorter with the aid of modest, wide-legged trousers that tapered at the knee. Modesty preserved; movement uninhibited. Job done.

But despite enthusiasm from several quarters, Miss Bloomer’s overall success was limited and bloomers themselves roundly mocked in most quarters for being just too weird. In 1859, she dropped her project altogether because of the arrival of a fresh sartorial development, immediately fashionable, sexually appealing and simple – something that, she felt, did the job of fusing modesty, comfort and practicality just as well. And the name of this marvel? The crinoline.

Underneath the Bridge.

The devoted may remember that this strange hooped structure, by virtue of moving independently of its owner, facilitated the easy movement of the legs underneath. Obviously you could not sally around bareback underneath (as you had mostly done before), and thus the ubiquity of pantalettes (elongated drawers). And here comes the bifurcated garment – not yet knickers, for they are still too long to qualify for a diminutive – relegated to underwear.

These pantalettes were not simply loose cotton trousers like the bloomer (although they could be), but frequently two separate garments, one for each leg; their intent was not to cover one’s proverbial shame, but rather to keep the legs out of sight (and rather toasty too). Thus, they frequently bifurcated at the rumpal regions rather than the legs themselves, in which form they remained until the turn of the century.

Daisy, Daisy…

It was the strange innovation of the bicycle that, for the first time since Amelia Bloomer, re-addressed the question of external female knickerbockers, for simple safety purposes. Though the haterz still hated, there was something about this new mode of transport that (literally) mobilised a whole generation of women, storming these shocking garments through to respectability on a bicycle. It may come as small surprise to learn that these sartorial liberators came swingin’ back into fashion in the 1960s, epitomised by Yves St. Laurent’s velvet knickerbocker suit, and extending to gender-neutral clothing, and jeans for both sexes.

Meanwhile, bloomers were beating a retreat up the leg as Mary Quant advanced a new weapon: the ‘mini-skirt’. For the first time, stockings and the bifurcated undergarments worn with them were conflated, and suddenly there was a need for practical brief coverings (with a name to match) to avoid flashing in the streets and, presumably, to protect the designer tights that went over them. Knickers had arrived. The decline of stockings as status quo prompted some to herald a new ‘sexless woman’ (A Good Thing), although this may also have resulted from a vogue for pre-pubescent figures combined with ambiguous schoolgirl traditions: puffed sleeves, pinafores, Mary-Janes and little boy-shorts. A strange sort of liberation, perhaps.

NEXT WEEK: L is for Lady