I’ve written before about the end of my teens, when I worked at Agent Provocateur selling £200 pants to men with new teeth and young wives. They often wore their wealth oddly, as if they’d flung it on just before they left the house in case of rain. Very quickly, they’d rifle through the rails, £1,000 plonked on the AmEx, would he like the thong, too? Yes? And suspender belt? And… the marabou mules, for later? They’d never ask the price, even though it was always there on the tip of my tongue, an ulcer. We, in our shoes that to this day mean my feet ache in cold weather, would take our time packaging them up in tissue paper and a pink box, and a thick silk ribbon. And then, inevitably, with a wettening of their lips, they’d make a little joke about one of the girls trying them on before we put the box in the bag, and everyone would giggle, and they’d go back to work happy, and we’d still be there.
I have a residual fondness for the shop, partly because it’s so tied up in my fantasies of youth, partly because I think of it whenever I smell lilies at their very end, so I’ve been watching its wobbles with interest. Agent Provocateur is being bought out by Four Holdings, as controlled by Sports Direct’s Mike Ashley. Thinking about it now, it makes perfect sense. Ashley is totally one of those old customers, with that plastic bag he carries instead of a briefcase, that careless busyness, except this time he’s bought the company as well as the mules. It’s time, isn’t it? For a change. Now is not the hour for peephole bras made of swan feathers and wax, or crotchless pants crafted with diamond sweat. That moment has not just passed but, having burned down in a terrible fire, its ashes were scattered at sea. And then the sea dried up. And now there’s nothing.
The New Yorker writer Ariel Levy has a beautiful memoir out right now, and it led me back to her 2005 book, Female Chauvinist Pigs, about the cartoon-like version of female sexuality that had become ubiquitous in America at the beginning of the century, around the time I was helping a woman into a corset while her boyfriend discreetly filmed through the curtain. Reading it today is almost comforting – a cosy nostalgia for a time when there was room to boggle at the Brazilian wax, or at pole dancing for sport. Today it’s no longer fashionable to dress like a fancy stripper – that lacy lingerie was a reaction to the braless 70s and 80s, and today’s sportswear and flat shoes are a reaction to the lacy lingerie. The problem with Agent Provocateur today is that the brand of sexiness it sells is fixed in one position, arch, performing and up for it, always.
As much as I love Agent Provocateur (one downside to working in a shop is that you develop a sort of Stockholm syndrome where wild prices and wacky taste becomes normalised, and you end up spending your wages on drawers full of underwear that peers up at you from among the maternity bras 15 years later), I agree it’s time for a change. Out with the stripper shoes, in with the strip lighting. Shop assistants there are already primed for agony – their 4in heels, their role in strangers’ sex lives. Secret filming has long been part of the job. The new agony will just be of a different flavour.
Warehouses filled with men knocked sideways by the memory of a breast. A mountain of knickers, half-price because they only cover 50% of your bum. Basques for watching telly in, suspenders to hold up baggy tights. Shop assistants staring at a wall of diamanté handcuffs, letting their eyes relax so they become smiling faces, mouthing, “Only three hours to go! Two hours and 58 minutes! Fifty seven!” Tea breaks that taste of cigarettes, and from 12.30 onwards, the smell of microwaved soup. Marabou mules organised by intended use, from “waddling from hotel room to ice dispenser”, to “waiting on chair for partner to finish in bathroom”, and backlit in yellow you’ll find, “sitting very still while friend untangles hair from nipple tassel”.
It’s all sport, it’s all direct. It’s all people buying clothes they think will make them more attractive. Besides, Sports Direct and Agent Provocateur’s clientele already overlaps. Both are people who appreciate big cups.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
