According to Sarah Shotton, the creative director of Agent Provocateur, the goal of the campaign was “to hero” a different kind of body. The sportswomen featured were given the choice of what they wanted to wear. And by wearing it in the context of their discipline, as opposed to the context of a runway show designed by men and largely attended by men, by doing it for a company run by women, in clothing designed by women, they are changing both the narrative and its authors.

This is pretty much the same argument used by Rihanna in her Savage x Fenty line, and expressed in her Amazon-streamed lingerie spectacular last September, which featured dancers, models and celebrities of all sizes and skin tones gyrating in a variety of ever tinier underthings and high heels — by their own choice. And it is the position of the Agent Provocateur athletes.

“A lot of times, as an elite athlete I feel we are told we are powerful but not feminine,” Ms. Harrison Claye, the hurdler, said. “So to have a brand celebrate a physique like mine spoke volumes to me. Because to me, my strength is my femininity. They don’t exist on either side of a divide.”

Yet it is impossible to view the images and not wonder if it is really women taking charge of their own sexuality that people will see or, rather, very strong women being reduced to their sexuality. (Victoria’s Secret also tried to suggest that the women in its shows felt empowered, only for some of them to announce later that they didn’t actually feel that way at all). Or not to wonder: Am I really meant to take this — and by association, her — seriously?