Joe Corré and Serena Rees: Sex and the City

Should you visit your stockbroker in the City of London this week, you may notice an unusual flurry of activity in the environs of the Royal Exchange. Serious men in important suits will be found staring into space on the pavements of EC3, holding shiny carrier bags of a distinctive powder-pink hue and distractedly humming a little tune. Senior fund managers, in the teeth of the worst market depression since 1929, will be seen queueing outside a certain door, faces wreathed in dreamy smiles. And an army of firm-jawed businesswomen in grey Jaeger suits and black Donna Karan jackets will be cramming out the tiny premises where Agent Provocateur is opening its third shop.

Should you visit your stockbroker in the City of London this week, you may notice an unusual flurry of activity in the environs of the Royal Exchange. Serious men in important suits will be found staring into space on the pavements of EC3, holding shiny carrier bags of a distinctive powder-pink hue and distractedly humming a little tune. Senior fund managers, in the teeth of the worst market depression since 1929, will be seen queueing outside a certain door, faces wreathed in dreamy smiles. And an army of firm-jawed businesswomen in grey Jaeger suits and black Donna Karan jackets will be cramming out the tiny premises where Agent Provocateur is opening its third shop.

Like its other gorgeous emporia in Soho and Knightsbridge, it will resemble something between a duchess's boudoir and a slightly enlarged jewellery-box. The wallpaper, in pink and black, has been specially designed by the owners. The racks of clothing will look strangely abbreviated, because most of the merchandise on the hangers is titchy. Here are pieces of material whose visual effectiveness is in inverse proportion to their size: miniature wisps of silk in pale blues and greens overlaid with ivory lace; delicate cotton camiknickers with saucy suspender attachments; stretchy black mini-corsets with a score of hooks-and-eyes round the back to drive boyfriends into paroxysms of frustration; hair-raising thongs in violet and plum; bras in floral strawberry-and-cream shades with tiny red rosebuds tucked in the middle...

The fact that men and women will both be buying AP's delicious bits of froufrou is part of the revolution that the company has wrought. Once, underwear in this country was either the sensible stuff women bought to wear concealed under their working clothes (and they bought it themselves), or it was the lacy, satiny, cutaway stuff that they wore on a date, designed to be thoroughly investigated later in the evening (and much of it was bought by men). Since Joe Corré and Serena Rees came along, all that changed. Ladies' underwear became a thing of beauty rather than of practicality or come-and-get-me sluttishness. The distinction between underwear and lingerie was eroded for good, as was the distinction between knickers as luxury or necessity.

"I remember going to the gym in the past," says Serena Rees, "and seeing so many women wearing really drab underwear. Even in the City, I was surprised to find so much greying, predictable stuff. What has been nice has been to see little flashes of colour coming in. It really seems as if we've made a difference over a period, even if it is just that one or two women in the changing-room now look a lot better than they did a few months ago."

Ms Rees can afford to sound pleased with her and her partner's success. They've been credited with everything from sexing up the modern Englishwoman, in a way undreamt of by Janet Reger, to being responsible for the whole national Zeitgeist of upmarket smut, as if they'd invented the thong and The Erotic Review as well.

Agent Provocateur has been going since December 1994, when the first shop opened in Broadwick Street and caused a sensation not unlike the effect Lady Godiva had on the citizens of Coventry. A similar bombshell hit the clothing world when, in 1999, Corré and Rees were asked to design a range of exciting undies for Marks & Spencer, and the resulting Salon Rose range went flying off the hangers like multicoloured bats out of hell. "It was very exciting to be able to do what we were doing on a national scale rather than out of an exclusive boutique," says Serena. "It's a wonderful feeling", agrees Joe, "to think there's a lady in Scunthorpe wearing a pair of your knickers and looking great in them."

They're a striking pair to meet. Their company HQ in the posh environs of Harley Street is fantastically palatial, a house designed by Robert Adam and inhabited by Lord Mansfield, with hangar-sized sitting- rooms and mile-high ceilings. A huge photographic print on the walls depicts the heavenly back view of a black-haired beauty sans knickers, while, amid the half-dozen low-slung Italian sofas I counted, several mystifying wooden structures criss-crossed with pink plastic macramé stand against the wall, as though waiting to be employed (once I've gone) in some bizarre game of trampoline sex.

Serena arrives late because her plane from Dublin was delayed. She's been seeing the buyers at Brown Thomas, the Irish capital's version of Liberty. Does this mean that they are setting out to educate modern Irish womanhood in the black arts of the fuchsia basque? (Visions of Siobhan Hathaway, the tempestuous Irish adulteress in The Archers, fill my head.) "We get requests from all over the world," says Joe Corré, flatly. "We've had department stores approaching us for years, saying, 'Can you do something in our store?' But whether we can recreate in a department store the atmosphere of our shops, and that intimate and personal experience of our customers, is a problem. Because if we can't do that, then we won't do it at all. We don't have any great mission to expand into every outlet we can."

Mr Corré, a man of exceptional taste that sits rather oddly with his south-London drone, likes to explain his company philosophy at length, about giving customers precisely what's right for them, the vital importance of the shopping "environment", his claim that, "We only have the confidence to sell people things we actually like" – as if the business of actually shifting units in exchange for hard cash were just too naff to be true. Serena, his wife, is a straighter talker and a quietly subversive influence. Born in London of Kashmiri parents (whom she never knew – she was adopted), she has lustrous black hair and fantastically dark brown eyes, and her burnt-caramel skin is frankly edible, and on the whole it is no great hardship at all to find oneself discussing ladies' underwear with Ms Rees, despite her husband's looming presence.

One thing you've done, I say, is to increase the peekaboo factor in modern office relationships. All over the nation, lady workers are giving their colleagues, of both sexes, sudden glimpses of mauve or baby-blue bra-strap or camisole string that implies, in a tip-of-the-iceberg way, some expensively sexy raiment at the end of it, and a matching riot of exotic underpinnings further down. You may have turned us all, I say, into a shocking bunch of voyeurs.

"It's funny about bra straps," she says. "When I was first designing them, I thought, how can I spend hours and hours staring at bits of elastic? But then it became really interesting to see how much of a difference to a woman I could make with little bits of elastic. The difference is about sexiness. It's something a woman does think about. She likes to know that she's wearing fantastic underwear, whether you can see it or not.

"The glimpse factor you're talking about is a male thing, but even if a woman sees a glimpse of underwear on another woman, that's sexy as well. But most women aren't aware of it. They don't go around saying, 'Look at my bra strap'. Although we do make beautiful straps that deserve to be seen."

"There was a nice story about Julia, this girl who used to work here..." begins Joe.

"You mentioned a name, Joe," says Serena. "You should never mention names".

"Anyway, this girl, she went to work for another company..."

"It's one of the customer rules, Joe," says his wife severely. "You should know that." She turns to me. "Everybody who works for us has to sign a confidentiality agreement, saying they'll never talk about the customers".

Joe struggles on with his story about Julia, who bought some saucy red unmentionables from AP and wore them to an important meeting. "Her boss was giving her a really hard time, and she just sat there with a smile on her face because he didn't know she was wearing this fantastic underwear."

"It was transparent," murmurs Serena.

"I love that," says Joe, dreamily.

He is, famously, the son of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren. Being the owner of the coolest pedigree since the Bourbon dynasty has given him a rather grand manner and a confident air that no amount of financial success could buy. It also means that he can wear the oddest clothes without worrying whether he looks unfashionable. When we meet, he is clad in a pair of black trousers with an unfeasibly baggy crotch. You could have harboured a six-pack of Budweiser and a pet rabbit in its capacious folds without alerting suspicion – but on him it looks OK. "It's a Vivienne Westwood design," he says. His short-sleeved Bermuda-style shirt is festooned with Cuban cigars ("Another of my mother's designs"). Around his neck is a diamanté skull-and-crossbones on a chain. Butler & Wilson? "No, that's Vivienne Westwood, too."

He is dressed, in other words, top to toe in his mother's stuff. But he was wearing her designs long before they were fashionable, going around the house in Seditionaries T-shirts at 10, hanging out with his father's most controversial associates, the Sex Pistols. "They came to the house a lot. I got on fine with most of them," says Corré. Steve Jones was great. Sid was very nice, he used to take me to the shops and buy me sweets. They'd just be, you know, nice with you. I never had much of a relationship with Rotten, though. He didn't like me and I didn't like him. But the band in general, I loved them. I was their biggest fan."

Corré was born in Clapham in 1967 (his surname comes from McLaren's Portugues-Jewish grandmother) and speaks of his legendary parents with fondness, despite the casual way they bounced him through a succession of schools all over south London. Stupidity was what he (and they) feared most, it seems.

"What was expected of me? I was expected not to be stupid. I was always afraid of doing something stupid – not in the sense that it might get me into trouble, but in the sense of doing something idiotic. If I did something idiotic, and had no explanation to defend myself, I'd get this look from my parents. I never needed any threat of physical or mental punishment. Just the look was enough. You never wanted to be put under the Stupid Spotlight."

What was it like when you were? "I remember coming home from school and having one of those conversations, where there's a school report that's saying, basically, 'He's stupid.' " Was he expelled? "No, never. But my parents would take me out of the school if they thought the school wasn't good enough, or if I wasn't being sufficiently inspired."

He left the groves of Academe at 16 and went to work for Vivienne Westwood, reopening her World's End shop, which had closed down for two years. Under his mother's tutelage, he became a company director when barely out of his teens. "We built up the business together," he says, "and by the time I left, we had three stores in London and we'd opened up in Japan."

He is – perhaps unsurprisingly, since his whole wardrobe shouts "Oedipal fixation" – heavily influenced by his mother and her shops. "I don't think there are many people in this country who have an independent business that employs so many people," he says. "And these other designers, like Alexander McQueen – I don't know who wears his clothes. These people just don't have that connection with the customer, the scene. I've grown up around all that, and I can't think of anybody who does it like she does. The way she maintains the circus-catwalk element and develops the business side of it at the same time, and remains independent – it's just incredible."

He and Serena Rees met 10 years ago at a nightclub. She was working at a model agency in Chelsea at the time. She claims that he used to walk past her in the King's Road every day, without noticing her. When they started their collaboration, they'd no intention of designing or producing anything. They were going to open a shop and buy in gorgeous things from all over the world. "We wanted things suggesting intimacy, glamour, beauty and fashion, and we went all over the world to build a kind of jewellery box," says Joe. "But we couldn't find much." What they did find was lots of vintage clothing, including stocks of 1940s and 1950s underwear that had been stashed away after shops had been bombed or closed down. Inspired by the ancient cotton and lace, and by the recent explosion of Lycra and Spandex that could be used in modern designs, they began to do it themselves. "We started to copy the old stuff, to use old-fashioned fabrics and colours," says Joe. "We started off in a small way, trying to recreate some of these garments, then developed from there into manufacturing. It was a huge culture shock, coming in from the fashion world with Vivienne to making underwear, where you have 24 sizes in a single bra and you discover that you need four different types of elastic..."

Agent Provocateur has recently spawned several imitators and pasticheurs, about which Corré and Rees are sleekly bitchy. "I've known Sadie Frost for years," says Joe. "She's a really lovely girl. I'd even sell her stuff in our store. [Frost started up a glamorous lingerie company earlier this year with her partner, Jemima French.] I'm sure they're probably very nice things. What I do have a problem with, though, what I find nauseating, is when people go to our manufacturers and say, 'Can you do something like this?' and then try to do exactly the same stuff as ours. I feel like saying, 'What the hell are you doing?' "

"And, of course," says Serena, "they couldn't do it like us, because they're not us, and a lot of it looked like shit." It isn't clear who exactly they're abusing at this moment, but it may not be a million miles from two new ventures that started up last year, either in hommage to Agent P or in direct competition. One was Myla; the other Coco de Mer, the corsets-and-dildos shop run by Anita Roddick's daughter Sam. "It was an extraordinary time," muses Corré. There was all this stuff in the press saying, 'Watch out, Agent Provocateur, this is going to bury you', and just about the same time, we went totally tabloid. Stories about Victoria Beckham buying underwear at our place, and J K Rowling buying our stuff just as she'd announced her engagement. For a whole month, we were front-page tabloid news..."

"Not that we went after it in any way, shape or form, of course," puts in his wife, possibly alluding to the company's marketing masterstroke of signing up Kylie Minogue for a cinema commercial in which she rode a bucking metallic bull while her clothes gradually fell off.

"...and, of course, there was Kylie, making grown men sweat," admits Corré. "But we went massive. I thought it was really funny. Like saying, 'D'you want some of this? OK, c'mon then', to the others." He reflects. "I am kinda competitive, but I like to compete on a level field. People who're competing by doing what you've already done, that's something different."

They have no immediate plans to expand into any other shops, nor to diversify (after David Beckham so kindly led the way) into designing specialist underwear for men. "There's no point. Straight men won't buy it, they'll be the last to pick up on it. Gay men would be into it immediately, but those guys have already got enough special underwear. They just don't need any more." He is strangely dogmatic about what people want and need, just as he is ever-so-slightly prudish about the more hardcore versions of the eroticism in which he deals. His voice drips with contempt for rubber fetishists, Ann Summers Nipple Drops (lager flavour), Erotica exhibitions at Olympia, luminous vibrators and the like. "I don't find that inspiring. What inspires me is the relationship between things and people. I think it's better to make something that might inspire people to have sex with each other, rather than getting off on a toy."

"The thing is," says Serena, "we're a specialist lingerie company, and we've been responsible for making lingerie fashionable, making it in fabrics and colours that you couldn't get elsewhere, making lingerie that people want to have. The great thing about it is, it's a small luxury. But it's not a joke, like some underwear shops, where the joke wears off after a while, particularly if it's an expensive one."

Joe Corré beams at his beautiful wife, as she gathers her legs under her on the Italian leather sofa. They and their company haven't put a foot, or a bra-strap, wrong in almost eight years. No wonder he likes turning the Stupidity Spotlight on the rest of the world, as it stands there in its glamour-free, grey unmentionables.

Deborah Ross returns next week

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