Collection de lingerie Aubade 1999-2009

The brand, founded in 1875 by Dr. Bernard and acquired in 1958 by Claude Pasquier, has long been an innovator in the textile industry. In the 1970s, Aubade was the first to do away with straps and then created the backless bra. This was Aubade’s “golden age,” as fashion sociologist Frédéric Monneyron confirms, “with a focus on the eroticism of underwear.” Over fifty years, the upscale brand built a solid reputation, benefiting from the enthusiasm of the French — and of men — for lingerie.

In 1995, Aubade scored its first major coup with its “leçons de séduction” (“seduction lessons”). Three years of work went into developing this advertising campaign for women’s underwear, which took over Parisian bus shelters and the women’s press, under a concept devised by Eric Flimon: each advertisement paired a close-up black-and-white photograph of a pair of buttocks or breasts with a caption playing on humor and double meaning — “feign indifference,” “win him over,” “smooth things over,” “take the words out of his mouth,” “put him in his place,” and so on. A full face never appears in these images, sometimes only a mouth; the man is absent from them, yet omnipresent by implication. For Marie-Noëlle Bas, president of Chiennes de garde, the explanation for this dichotomy is clear: “Aubade has long had a strategy of arousing men through lascivious poses and hypersexualized bodies.” Fanny Anselme — a model who posed for Aubade in about ten “lessons” — while acknowledging that “the brand’s customers are overwhelmingly men,” defended the brand: “For many, Aubade’s advertisements are certainly provocative, but not sexist. They are even popular with female consumers.”

The collection comprises about 150 posters, spanning four periods, with six different photographers (Bernard Matussière at the very beginning, then Hervé Bruhat, Hervé Lewis, Michel Pérez, Thomas Paquet and finally Terry Tsiolis). Since it seemed difficult, if not impossible, to find the rare model who could pose for both the top and bottom with perfect proportions, about fifteen young women were photographed during the campaign’s first ten years. Two, however, posed for both the top and the bottom. Vanessa Demouy was one of them (the actress posed for lessons 5 to 12); then, a few years of frantic casting later, a certain Sophie, spotted on the street and introduced by photographer Hervé Lewis: “we did all the last Leçons with her. Sophie is a young student from Montpellier,” confides Françoise Barthélémy, sales manager at Carlin, Aubade’s agency since 1994. She appears — starting with no. 30 — in nearly a third of the lessons!

Each print bears a provenance label on the verso (Artus Enchères sale | Aubade); 18 prints are signed by Hervé Lewis (Spring-Summer and Fall-Winter collections between 1999 and 2003) and 7 prints signed by Michel Pérez (Spring-Summer and Fall-Winter collections between 2003 and 2009).