Interview: Joe Corré

With Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood for parents, Joe Corré has been on the fashion frontline since birth. He tells Tom Hodgkinson how he went his own way and why his latest venture is lighting a path for new designers

On a bright crisp autumn morning I lock my bicycle to a post opposite the Light House on Soho’s Berwick Street. It’s the latest project from the dandy punk retailer Joe Corré, and has only been open for three weeks. Joe was co-founder of Agent Provocateur, the lingerie brand which opened its first shop in December 1994. I remember going there with Victoria: it was loads of fun, like a Parisian boudoir. The business grew at an amazing rate and Joe and his co-founder and ex-wife Serena Rees sold out to private equity firm 3i for a tidy sum in 2007 – 3i later totally wrecked the business, Joe will tell me.

Joe’s also known, of course, for being the son of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, and says he grew up in a chaotic and often moneyless household, but which nevertheless gave him punk courage, the idea that you should do what you want with your life. His surname comes from his Dad’s maternal grandmother.

There’s an air of theatre as you enter the shop. First off, there’s a security guard on the door, dressed all in black. On getting past him, you’re greeted by two charming girls dressed in tight pinstripe suits and high heels. One of them, Olivia, takes me up the Georgian staircase past Hogarth prints and erotic drawings to a first-floor kitchen with a roof terrace. A moment later Joe appears, accompanied by his dog, Elvis, a Patterdale and Lakeland terrier cross.

I’m not sure why but I was expecting a bold, brash and loud character, whereas Joe is in fact fairly meek and mild. “Didn’t you move to Dorset or something? I read your book,” he says. Olivia brings us a cup of tea and we sit on the balcony, Joe lights a rollie and I do the same.

He got his retail training the hard way, he says, working for his mother during a very difficult period, the mid-eighties.

“That was a real, real struggle. We had no money. We were all signing on. We were starting from zero. Not zero in terms of credibility and history, but zero in terms of business. In fact, minus in terms of business. Over the first year or two, there were people turning up saying, you owe us money from five years ago. She didn’t have a limited company when she worked with my father, it was a legal partnership. Each partner is fully liable for the debts, and my Dad had fucked off to Los Angeles to be some movie producer.”

McLaren’s considerable energy, he says, went in the wrong direction.

“When they broke up my father was extremely destructive. He tried to crash and burn the whole business, which he successfully did. He felt that everything that happened was because of him, and he didn’t want anything left behind, and he also wanted to hurt Vivienne for his own selfish reasons.”

Jeff Banks was their saviour, he says. “He was a mentor. I would talk to him once a week. He was there on the side, trying to help us to kind of get ourselves together. Very, very important. It wouldn’t have happened without him, he was a bloody knight in shining armour.”

Cut to eight years later, and Vivienne Westwood is thriving, with three shops, a freehold office and a guaranteed £100,000 a season in orders. “I felt a big sense of responsibility to make sure she was going to be all right. And when I got to that point, I felt I could leave.”

Joe decided he wanted to set up on his own and had the idea for Agent Provocateur. He went to his Dad for advice.

“He said: ‘Think big and spend other people’s money.’ So I thought big. I spent all my own money on a flashy prospectus for an erotic department store. I had this idea that I could get £1,000 from 100 people. I went round loads of people: Adam Ant, and what’s his name from the Eurythmics – people that had plenty of money. Not one of them wanted to give me a pound. Not one.”

So he went back to his Dad.

“‘Would you invest in this fucking thing?’ He looked down and went, ‘Er… well… my girlfriend won’t let me invest.’ I just thought, you fucking cunt. I’ve spent all my money listening to you and your stupid advice. And look where I am now.”

Rage carried Joe forward. “I got angry about it. I just went, fuck it. Fuck all of you. I sold everything I had. I sold all my possessions, sold my car, sold all of my old punk rock memorabilia, sold anything I could lay my hands on. I was going to Camden Market on the weekends, knocking stuff out. And I managed to get enough money to get that one shot.”

The first Agent Provocateur – “the name came to me in a dream” – opened on 14 December 1994.

“And by Christmas, ten days later, I’d made all my money back.”

Not all women liked the shop. “I remember I had this woman come in there saying she wanted to return something she’d been bought for Christmas. She said, ‘I can’t possibly wear this, I’m a feminist.’ And I was like, ‘and it makes you look really feminine. What’s the fucking problem? What you’re basically saying is, you can’t wear this because you think it’s for men. But in fact, it makes you more powerful.’”

By 2007, he and Serena Rees had grown the business to over 30 outlets. Then they split up, and sold out, each one making a sizeable fortune, in the tens of millions, so the papers said. But by the end, he says, all the creativity had been sucked out of the business.

“It’s also more stressful. If something doesn’t sell in one shop, you’re OK. If it doesn’t sell in 30 shops, you’ve got a problem.”

He’s now very anti-landlord. “With Agent Provocateur, we were lucky. We had a private landlord who gave us six months’ rent-free in the first year, so we only paid £7,000. What happens nowadays is that giant landlords like Shaftesbury Estates get the highest rents without caring about the area. I enquired about one shop which had a TO LET sign. They said, no we don’t want clothing there, that’s a food street. They’re zoning everything off.”

He says that life is now nigh-on impossible for independent retailers. “You’re just getting going after five years, and the landlord will double or triple the rent.”

Luckily Joe was in a position to buy the freehold of his current building when it came up seven years ago. It was owned by a lighting firm (hence the name the Light House) that went bankrupt and was still filled with old stock and machinery. It’s taken seven years to renovate it, and get the place up and running.

His idea is to showcase the kind of smaller brands that can’t afford bricks and mortar in London. He sells their stuff alongside his own clothing brand, A Child of the Jago. And he really wants people to get into his “made-to-order” service.

I mention that I loved a comment he made in an interview a few years ago. Something like: “The customer is always right? Bollocks.”

“Yeah. In reality, the customer isn’t right at all. Most of the time they don’t know what they want. They’re trusting you to show them what it is. Or at least that’s the kind of business that I have been involved in, starting working for my mother. You’re selling something that’s a bit avant garde and has got a story behind it. And that’s what people are buying into. They’re looking for guidance.”

The basement houses off-the-peg items, like his T-shirts with Hogarth Rake’s Progress prints on them, and a lot of knickers and leather and PVC items that look slightly scary. There’s a sculpture made from bits of old lights by Joe Rush of The Mutoid Waste Company. At the back of the ground floor a long room stretches out complete with bar.

“This is our members’ club,” says Joe. “The beauty of this is that our designers will be able to come here for a cup of tea with their customers.

“Most designers and creatives have now been priced out of London. They’re all living in Margate or wherever. And they’re not only designing, and doing the production, and the manufacturing, they’re now having to do the photography and marketing and spending half their life on Instagram.

“They’re having to do all this work aside from their creative work, and they only get to meet their customers once in a blue moon. They’ll do a pop-up, or meet them in a coffee shop and pull something out of a bag in a hotel foyer. And it becomes very difficult for them to continue to do what they do. So the idea with this place is to support that kind of creative industry and craftsmanship.”

Here, Joe’s enthusiasm echoes that of his mother, whose association with craft industries goes back to the bondage trousers she first made out of Harris Tweed in 1976 and sold at what was then Seditionaries. A trip to the Outer Hebrides in 1980 to watch the weavers in action cemented the relationship, and her subsequent Harris Tweed collection was instrumental in reviving the fashion industry’s interest in the ultimate heritage fabric. Which is why Harris Tweed turned a blind eye to her appropriation of their sceptre symbol into her Vivienne Westwood logo.

“She fell in love with the fabric, the crofters that made it, the qualities of the sheep’s coats which had evolved to flourish in the climate of the island, a wild and beautiful place that echoed in the qualities of the cloth. The colours of the cloth were particularly influenced by the colours of the landscape and Vivienne designed clothes that championed those qualities making them heroic and romantic.”

She also had her woollen twinsets made by the Queen’s favourite, John Smedley, from her native Derbyshire. Joe is just as enthusiastic about wool.

“Wool is just a fabulous fabric. It’s a fabulous cloth. It’s a shame though, that the body of industry that developed that cloth in this country around Huddersfield, with the clear Pennine waters, which washed it and turned the mills and all of that… they haven’t got it together, like they have in France, for example, with the silks around Lyon. There’s a few mills left, but not many. I like to work with it, but where I’m going now with made-to-order, I need to have a stock service [i.e. order small quantities] because I don’t want to have to buy 60 metres at £50 a metre.”

Joe says people don’t understand the concept of quality any more.

“Huddersfield used to produce the finest woollen cloth in the world. Now the people who live in Huddersfield wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a bit of shoddy from Italy and a fine wool suiting from a local Huddersfield Mill. I think that’s a shame. I think it’s a shame that young people don’t understand that either.

“I used to go with my Mum to buy cloth in the East End from Mr Levy. I loved the brown paper parcels with a bolt of cloth inside, rolling it out, cutting it up, receiving the whole thing tied up in string. And the quality of those things, they last. You don’t get moths. You can’t top it. It’s the best, best fabric. And obviously, because of the malleability of wool, you can make amazing things. I make a lot of hats from wool, which I still make in Luton.”

He now needs to educate the wrong-thinking customer out there.

“It’s about made-to-order. It’s about by-appointment. You can buy some stuff off the rack downstairs, sure you can, and we’ve got lots of little bits and bobs. But the emphasis is on you participating in the process. This isn’t something you can repeat online. It’s something that’s for you, and you’re going to participate in it. And that’s the challenge, to make that work.”

The Light House will house a salon, too. “Our final phase, the fourth phase, will be the intellectual side of things, the cultural salon. Our motto is Lux Me Ducet, the light will guide me.”

This nice Latin phrase was taken from the author of Pinocchio.

“I got that from Collodi, who wrote Pinocchio which, I found out, is the best-selling book of all time. The story of Pinocchio is very, very intelligent.”

Pinocchio was published in 1883. Its author Carlo Collodi (1826-1890) was a Florentine radical who chose in later life to express himself in children’s stories rather than politics. Joe tells me that Collodi, when young, edited a magazine called The Lamp Light, in Italian Il Lampione, with the motto Lux Me Ducet.

Our interview is over but I have one final question. “Can I get some like, some knickers for my wife before I go?”

In the basement Joe sells me some tasteful French knickers and one of the Hogarth T-shirts. I get back on my bike feeling very happy.

The Light House is at 48 Berwick Street, London W1F 8JD. lighthousesoho.com

This article is from Idler #107, January/February 2026 – out now.

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