Sex rebranded: how underwear jumped on the #MeToo bandwagon

What a time for female empowerment. The day after International Women’s Day, shortly before Harvey Weinstein was handed his 23-year jail sentence, and days before Kate Beckinsale outlined a run-in with the rapist movie mogul in which he called her a “cunt” for wearing a suit to a premiere, the British lingerie company Agent Provocateur released an underwear campaign celebrating “the unparalleled potential of the female physique”.

It opens with a woman’s bottom and closes with another’s cleavage.

But here’s the twist. The bottom and breasts belong to four high-profile athletes – British gymnast Georgia-Mae Fenton, Canadian pole vaulter Alysha Newman, American climber Sasha DiGiulian and American hurdler Queen Harrison Claye.

The four women pole vault, climb and spin for one soft-focused minute in their underwear while Yello’s Oh Yeah (a song that film critic Jonathan Bernstein describes as “synonymous with lust”) provides the ironic soundtrack for us to chuckle along to. Sexy, not sexist!

Sarah Shotton, creative director at the British lingerie brand, describes the apparel as “under-armour” and the women “feminine as well as athletic”. The athletes don’t make eye-contact with the viewer, but the gaze remains external (it’s worth noting that the creative team behind the ad are all women, and that the women in the adverts all chose what they wore). This is sex rebranded as empowerment, or empowerment reframed as sex.

Delivered with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, it also serves as a reminder, in case we needed one, that there really is no movement – in this case female empowerment – that can’t be commodified. It suggests that athleticism is an attractive quality, and that while sex sells, so too does strength.

The world of athletic prowess, so often coloured in masculine hues, is shown in a different light. Athletes, it turns out, can be sexy. And sexy, we discover, can be athletic. It’s just... not always easy to see the wood for the tits.

Susanna Cordner, senior research fellow at the London College of Fashion, who worked on the V&A’s 2016-7 exhibition Undressed: a Brief History of Underwear, says the campaign works by flipping two historical tropes in underwear advertising.

“The first can be traced from 19thcentury adverts for corsets that supposedly supported you during exercise, and 1930s campaigns for companies like Charnaux that [used] illustrations of women in action. The implication was that underwear can aid your performance and experience of physical activity.”

The second is using a photograph of a famous figure in a different context, one that reveals another side – perhaps a sexier one? It’s one deployed by Nike and Adidas, and by countless celebrities fronting fashion campaigns. And this is where it gets interesting, says Cordner. Is athletics after this sort of rebrand? Does sprinting in bubblegum