You could read the title of the campaign film for Agent Provocateur’s 2013 AW campaign as a command to keep yourself in check, but really the risqué lingerie brand is urging you to be your own boss. Don’t hand in your notice quite yet; in the words of director John Cameron Mitchell:
“We were trying to make a fun film about how Agent Provocateur can actually help a woman free herself by controlling herself.”
The film is a well timed parody of Fashion Week, featuring a ridiculous and demanding male designer flanked by evil stylist sidekicks, all ruling over a dystopian backstage underworld. Boobs are banned, as are buns of both the bodily and baking variety. Hair is pulled, the collection won’t accommodate a single curve and the crew are downright cruel, save one sympathetic librarian figure. Things change however, when The Rescuer steps up.
Said Rescuer is smoking hot yet underappreciated model Melissa George in full Hunted mode. The pout is out, as is the icy cool rage. She saves the similarly tortured Elettra Wiedemann from a nasty cake-induced fall, before defying protocol by going in for a kiss and eventually telling the outraged designer where to go.
To see how she does this, you’ll have to watch, but I’m not sure it’s the method we’d choose to take our manager down a peg or two. Being on planet fashion however, it works a treat, and Elettra and Melissa join Chloe Hayward (The Blonde) to stage a catwalk coup, with the librarian also liberating herself from the designer’s dictatorship. Even the cameraman eventually gets it; these women run the show.
Of the film’s casting, Agent Provocateur states that Melissa, Elettra and Chloe were chosen as ‘each one a strong character, each a different body shape and each one a sense of humour that is essential to the brand’s DNA’. This is a plucky and powerful posse; Elettra is the daughter of Isabella Rossellini and granddaughter of Ingrid Bergman with a BA in International Relations, Chloe is a breakout bombshell model with a BA in English and Drama and Melissa used to play Angel in Home & Away (as good as a degree to us) before becoming a film star.
They’ve bagged the best gigs in the modelling and acting worlds and always keep it real. Melissa was eight weeks pregnant during the time of shooting, later tweeting ‘who said pregnancy isn’t sexy?’ Chloe also kept her feet firmly on the ground when talk of the high profile campaign hit the Twitter, declaring amidst the hubbub:
“Nothing beats the feeling of fixing a printer. Nothing. Technology I defeat you.”
Who runs the world?