The first time I saw an Ann Summers shop in London I cringed. No, it wasn’t because I’m a conservative and prudish young woman and what I saw in the shop windows deeply upset me. I actually cringed at the bad quality stuff in the windows. Ann Summers’ shop in Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street for example always managed to provoke in me a sort of deep revulsion, thanks to its windows featuring horrific lingerie, polyester nurse uniforms and costumes that I’m sure don’t spark up any kind of sexy atmosphere in the bedroom, but might literally sparkle you up if you accidentally find yourself near flames and heat sources.
In the last few years, the reaction to Ann Summers and trashy lingerie caused a sort of reaction and the birth of female-orientated, chic and glamorous shops such as Coco de Mer and Agent Provocateur.
Run by Sam Roddick, daughter of the late Anita, the mind behind The Body Shop, London-based Coco de Mer is famous for its Victorian boudoir atmosphere, its dressing rooms with a peephole for partners and its corsets, but also for its fair trade spanking paddles, leather handcuffs and non-toxic sex toys such as naturally felled wood dildos. Shame, though, that the prices aren’t so “ethical”: a paddle can set you back about £70, a conceptual artist designed flogger costs over £300.
Glasgow seems to have caught the stylish and expensive lingerie bug at the end of 2007 when the first Agent Provocateur shop opened in the Merchant City, followed a few weeks ago by another chic lingerie shop by brand Boudiche.
Despite its fame of prudish capital, Edinburgh always had a history of sexual pleasures. In the 18th Century, the city boasted one of the branches of the all-male private sex club the Beggar’s Benison. Its activities included drunkenness, debauchery and even lectures about contraception.
Fast-forward to the present day and you’ll discover that this time it’s a shop carrying out a very special sexual revolution in Edinburgh. The locus of the operation, Organic Pleasures, is in the heart of the New Town.
The products sold here – among them water-based lubricants, massage oil pourable soy candles, non-toxic and hypo-allergenic vibrators and clitoral stimulators, classy lingerie and accessories like ostrich feather ticklers and silk masks ideal to unleash the burlesque diva in you – are neatly but seductively arranged around the part bedroom-part burlesque boudoir shop.
Women think it’s glamorous, men love it, the media say it’s all about cool subservient subjugation and elegant S&M, so Scotland seems to be enjoying its chic lingerie and sex shops. But there are too many questions I keep on asking when I pass the windows of such shops: did it take so long to British women to realise shops sold bad quality and very unstylish lingerie? Does it just take a vibrator and sexy lingerie to feel “liberated”? Above all, isn’t this maybe all about capitalism selling sex back to women? Under the massive ad campaigns lies a sad truth: this is a profit-led business like any other, not even new, as Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s fetishist shop Sex (later Seditionaries) on King’s Road prove (and that at least spawned the Sex Pistols).
Want a bit of stylish power and submission? Re-read the S&M fantasy Story of O by Pauline Réage, it might not be as cutting edge as Agent Provocateur’s advertising campaigns, but it’s still cheaper than a handmade tally-ho chair with hand-stitched saddle and leather stirrups (available at Coco de Mer, price: £2.570).
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