Autumn's Fash-Leisure Update Comes Straight From Serena Rees's Les Girls Les Boys

When Agent Provocateur founder Serena Rees launched Les Girls Les Boys a year ago, the underwear-meets-streetwear – or bed-to-street – brand was an interesting proposition. A far cry from the overtly sexual identity of the household lingerie label she started in 1994, her second venture was all about celebrating cross-cultural and generational identities within unfiltered, unpretentious products and branding.

One year on, and Rees’s mission to throw old-school ideas about intimates out the window is still going strong. For the autumn/winter 2018 campaign, she enlisted a series of street-cast individuals, gave them new-season lingerie, sweats and tees to layer, and then shot them on Polaroid film. The resulting bare-skinned, natural profile shots are a breath of fresh air. “It was very important to me to get a group of people I believed would hang out, complement each other, and feel real and true to the brand ethos.”

The product is heavily influenced by her 21-year-old daughter, Cora, and her friends, who congregate around the kitchen in the family’s Marylebone home. “Watching how they interact together and how they wear things has been really interesting for me,” Rees says. “They are creatures of comfort – they want to feel good but ultimately still look great.”

The colour palette – dark green, slate and a fabulous pink join the sweats family for AW18 and there are vintage-wash pieces to transport buyers back to the ’90s – also sets Les Girls Les Boys apart from competitor athleisure brands. And the cut. This season Rees is particularly thrilled about the vests. “They are perfection,” she enthuses. “Our customers know that the shape has to be spot on – the line is so important. And that attention to detail is apparent across the whole collection.”

As far as major fashion brands muscling in on the athleisure action goes, Rees is far from concerned. “I renamed [our offering] ‘fash-leisure' or 'fash-leisurewear’,” she explains. “For me, athleisure comes from functional sportswear, and quite often it’s not very fashionable at all. What we do has a cooler edge – the layering really helps with the concept.”

Did she mention that there are some “amazing big knickers" for autumn too? "All the girls have gone crazy about them." As well as understanding exactly how the twentysomething crowd surrounding her wants to dress – “layers to put on and layers to take off in our unpredictable weather” – Rees has thought of everything. Prices start at £20. All pieces are available at Lesgirlslesboys.com, and Selfridges.com and Net-a-porter.com from October.