Agent Provocateur is up for sale, or in business speak, “open to offers” (there is a space between private equity and lingerie where everything sounds suggestive). It could be just another familiar finance story, a private equity firm taking a boutique brand to the mass market then watching, astonished, as it turns out that the boutiquey-ness was what people liked about. The sales held but the profits didn’t. If that were the story, the mystery is how it lasted so long, since the PE firm 3i bought a majority share in the company a decade ago, following the divorce of its founders, Serena Rees and Joseph Corré, son of Malcolm McLaren and Dame Vivienne Westwood.

This feels like something different: the brand exemplified and distilled the 90s in so many ways, cultural and economic, that the whiff of the doldrums have the jolt of history catching up with it, the way Tony Blair will one day look in the mirror and realise nobody’s listening to him on the EU, even though he’s right. The company may or may not survive, but its top end image is over.

From the perspective of the fin de siecle’s vexed feminism, Agent Provocateur said something subtle but vital: “It wasn’t about fashion,” Charlotte Moore, the editor of Instyle, remembers. “It was about being overtly sexual. All that underwear, previously, you could only buy in a sex shop. It was very daring. They sold leather whips, for god’s sake.” There was a detailed nostalgia spliced with a punk aesthetic that made it feel almost intellectually confrontational, which turned it into a statement of empowerment.

High-street erotica … an AP store in London. Photograph: Carl Court/Getty Images

Sue Tibbals is a feminist campaigner who at that point was working for the Women’s Environmental Network, “using washable sanitary towels, in an eco-feminist reverie. I didn’t engage with it a lot, though I did buy a very delightful feather cocktickler, which sat on my kitchen shelf for ages. It didn’t get a lot of its primary-purpose use.” She is wary of freighting any 90s or noughties style statement with too much philosophical significance, because “I’ve been very frustrated by the fact that people keep commenting on feminism and clothing as though the two were indivisible. But it was relevant, because it was an act of re-appropriation. Could we take on the tropes of male fantasy on our own terms? That’s the difference between being dominated and dominating.”

It was, in many ways, a reaction against the 70s and 80s, when you proved your power by framing all underwear – except functional grey utility pants – as a tool of male oppression. The problem with that was the sense of being over-policed; there is nothing very empowering about being told what kind of a feminist and a woman you are on the basis of whether or not you’re wearing a bra, and whether or not it is lacy. There was a ludic quality to Agent Provocateur’s corsets and sequinned pasties, a feeling of having won the war by laughing at the battles.

As the brand moved into the 21st century, it rolled this post-feminist empowerment in with a celebrity culture that was self-aware, arch and intensely knowing, but none of us was exactly sure what it was we knew. The famous ad was Kylie Minogue on a velvet bucking bronco, proving that it was the most “erotic underwear in the world” by saying at the end, in a manner that when you look back wasn’t really sexy at all, but more like a focus group in Mad Men: “Would all the men in the audience please stand up?” This was the era of Kylie’s butt, a time when people would ask rhetorically, but also querulously, “Will Kylie please leave her arse at home?”, as if, were she a more reasonable person, she would manage without it. It was the definition of what we used to call post-irony: if erotica was wrong because it was objectifying, to retake erotica meant to literally disaggregate people into their body parts, and then laugh.

Joe Corre and Serena Rees. Photograph: David Sillitoe/The Guardian

Running alongside that was the price: it was like going into a restaurant for the first time and discovering how much a steak cost. You would pick up a thing in Agent Provocateur thinking it would reasonably be about 50 quid, and £279 would leap unashamed from the fancy pink tag. Sian Alexandra is a 25-year-old underwear designer, who came of age at the tail end of all this. “All the young lingerie bloggers are fans of the brand,” she says – but points out nobody could ever afford it. Young people have never been able to afford it, plainly; but the pre-crash mindset was different – the aspirations were absurd but nobody ever said it. I remember doing a joke feature, in which I totted up how much you would spend a month for the baseline minimum of grooming as recommended by a women’s magazine: waxing, facials, gym membership, blow dries, manicures, all that. It was about as expensive as stabling a race horse.



Alexander describes new trends in lingerie: “Neon Moon do lingerie that isn’t for the male gaze; it’s very plain, it’s very ethical. Lonely Lingerie is designed to be worn on your own. A lot of stuff is being taken back from the male gaze. You’ll go into Top Shop and there’ll be a bra with hearts over the nipples. That would probably scare a lot of guys off.” “Why, what do men like?” “They like frilly baby dolls. Cami sets,” she says, witheringly.

The Agent Provocateur era feels more like a phase we had to pass through than a place to mourn, particularly. The purpose was to puncture the patriarchy by borrowing its garb, then run away laughing. I complained a lot at the time, but owned no tights at all that weren’t fishnets. Not all of us engaged as intelligently as Madonna; in fact, almost no one did. “She really did cop it for daring to put herself out there, not as a sexual object but as a sexual woman. That’s the distinction,” Tibbals concludes. “There’s no right or wrong with cultural signifiers. It’s all about the terms on which you engage.”