AT Leather Lane street market in London's ultra-hip Clerkenwell, there's a stall flogging knicker and bra sets for £2 a pop. Nearby is another selling old fashion magazines - old as in last week, last month, or last year. Some have been fingered and palmed, others lie unread. From the pages of one, a familiar face peeps out: Vivienne Westwood, grand dame of the British fashion scene.

Across the road, in a smart building of brown stone and black glass, above a recessed doorway in which a pink neon sign burns urgently, sits the new headquarters of Agent Provocateur. Probably the world's most famous lingerie brand - certainly its sexiest and most notorious - it's a business built on knicker and bra sets which go for considerably more than £2 a pop. It is run by Vivienne Westwood's son and former employee, Joseph Corre.

From the air of seductive luxury that pertains in the lobby to the nipple tassels in the meeting room upstairs, there is a constant whiff of sex and subversion. Partly it comes from Agent Provocateur's fragrance range - a new scent, Diamond Dust, launches next month - but mostly it's the conjuring act of a fashion adept. Westwood has taught her boy well.

In person, Corre is more reminiscent of his father, former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren. Tall, dandified, a slave to handmade suits of extravagant colour and cut, he talks in the same Cockney accent, part-drawl and part-sneer.

Today's garb is a sort of teddy-boy outfit in thick grey stripes. His shoes are black and pointed and sparkly, and the top three buttons on his wide-collared pink shirt are undone to reveal a gold chain, a tattoo on his left breast bearing the name of his 11-year-old daughter Cora ("Always on my heart," he jokes) and such an abundance of chest hair that words like "matted" and "springy" come unbidden to my mind. At least two of his 10 fingers are ringed with gold. He's a man to turn heads.

The author and critic Julie Burchill once wrote that "we are all children of Thatcher and McLaren". For Corre, of course, it's halfway to being literally true and he's none too happy for the reminder. "F***ing wanker," is his first response when I mention McLaren, who "walked out" on the family when Corre was barely into his teens, leaving Westwood to raise him and his step-brother Ben alone.

For his part, McLaren tells a story about being given money by his grandmother, Rose Corre Isaacs, to fund an abortion for Westwood after she discovered that she was pregnant with Joseph. Instead of a termination, she bought a cashmere twinset.

This particular father-son relationship yo-yos between freeze and thaw. How are things now? "Terrible," says Corre. "I don't even know where he is. I think he's spending a lot of time in America, which can't be very good for him."

For his mother, however, he has only superlatives. "I've got the utmost respect for her," he says. "I think she's amazing."

Now 40, Corre worked for his mother for nearly a decade before setting up on his own, after a childhood in which the family's small front room was turned into a makeshift factory-cum-studio. He watched her success and her failures at first hand and learned good lessons from both.

"My mum's never given a shit about money," he says. "She's always been interested in the artistic side of things and making something great and she's been pretty terrible at business decisions. My father's even worse at business decisions. I don't think he's ever done a good deal in his life. And I got fed up with it. I thought there's no reason to be like this'."

Although a natural entrepreneur, Corre hates to style himself a businessman. He makes phrases like "market share" and "business plan" sound like sexually transmitted diseases, about as welcome in his mouth as lumpy milk. Nevertheless, Agent Provocateur has been a hit. Founded in 1994 with his then-partner Serena Rees, the first store opened in Soho's Broadwick Street and there are now branches across Europe, the US, the Middle East and Asia. The good citizens of Dubai, Qatar and Bahrain all have outlets within their reach and last year a store opened in Glasgow's Ingram Street.

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AS CORRE sees it, the key to his success has been a steadfast belief in the quality of the product, allied to a deep love of the sensual inner life it makes manifest. Basically, he loves three things: women, underwear and women in underwear. This translates into passion, which translates into a brand with magnetic appeal.

"I really like girls and I really love sex. I really love the whole idea of having that in your lifestyle, of that being what you do," he says.

"A woman's naked body, for me, is not that sexy. A striptease, for me, is not about getting naked, it's about keeping something on. That way it makes the body more exotic. A naked body is natural - but what we do is make it supernatural."

Supernatural to you, the male observer, or supernatural to the female wearer?

"Both," he counters, "because it's like a superhero costume. They are heroic. That's what it's about. It's about someone taking their clothes off and going I look f***ing fantastic - and I feel great'."

And do women actually tell you that?

"Absolutely. All the time. Women are forever showing me their underwear."

He mimes a woman dipping a hand into a skirt and letting an inch of satin peep up over her hip bone - and he grins a little wolfish grin. "I love that. I think it's great".

That he can persuade women like Kylie Minogue, Kate Moss and Hollywood actress Maggie Gyllenhaal to strip for his adverts helps too, of course. Minogue famously rode a padded mechanical bull wearing an Agent Provocateur suspender set in a cinema trailer that became an instant classic and, when it was released virally onto the internet, a crowd-pleasing fixture on many an office drone's desktop. Moss was filmed by director Mike Figgis in 2006 for a series of kinky shorts called The Four Dreams Of Miss X, and Dark Knight star Gyllenhaal traded on her turn in the kinky spank-fest Secretary when she fronted last year's campaign, The Adventures Of Miss AP.

This year's campaign, a lush Gothic tableau called The Season Of The Witch, was shot in the dining hall of a stately home in Herefordshire by longtime collaborator Tim Bret Day. The pictures feature It Girl of the moment Daisy Lowe in a variety of barely-there confections and, if you look hard, you can see Peaches Geldof flashing her apples too. Hanging over the balcony and conducting proceedings like a demonic ringmaster is Corre himself, costumed, perhaps, with clothes from A Child Of The Jago, the quirky vintage menswear shop he recently opened in Shoreditch.

Not all is well in the love garden, however. Last year Corre and Rees separated after she was reported to have begun a relationship with Paul Simonon, once the bassist in punk icons The Clash. In a cruel irony, Simonon's former bandmate Mick Jones plays in a group with Corre called Dirty Stop Outs. Rees left the business she had co-founded and, last November, it was announced that the private equity house 3i had bought a £60 million majority stake in the firm.

So was this a buyout or an investment?

"It was a very strange situation, I have to say," says Corre. "I'd split up with Serena and I was trying to buy the company, not sell it. But through reasons of my divorce and everything else it ended up that I had to sell it. But it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened. Was it a buyout? Well, I'm still here. I'm still a large shareholder and I feel like we have a structure now that enables us to get on and do some of the things that now interest me more."

For Corre that means less time worrying about market share and business plans and more time spent on the creative side. Which in turn means he can concentrate on designing items like the blindfold in the case behind us on which is written, in fine copperplate script, the words: "F*** me, treat me like the whore that I am, then get the f*** out." At least I think it's a blindfold.

Given Corre's antipathy towards one parent and his reverence for the other, and the obvious parallels between his career and theirs, I ask him which one he thinks he most resembles: mother or father? He gives a weary sigh. It's evidently a question that troubles him.

"At certain points in my life," he muses, "I've looked down and thought Hang on, this looks really like a stuck record. I'm just a total product of my parents. I'm doing exactly the same things they were doing. It seems totally new to me but then I realise it's like Groundhog Day. It's happened before: open a shop, create a scene, develop it into a product, use your ideas, use your window displays, stir things up, challenge the status quo."

What convinces him that he is not merely an echo, however, is his desire for financial success, if only to ensure the solidity of the business he loves. He returns again and again to the need for self-confidence and self-belief. Its most cogent expression comes towards the end of our conversation.

"I felt at a certain point I had an awakening," he tells me. "I felt you can really do what you want to do here. You can create something. You don't have to limit yourself to whatever your capabilities are. You can go wherever you want. You can do whatever you want. There's nobody cleverer than you. It's about confidence and having a good idea and being clever with it and making it work."

What prompted that recollection was another one, about the miners' strike of the 1980s. "Why would you want to fight for the right for your son to continue to go down a f***ing black hole, breathe a load of coal dust, get some horrible f***ing disease and get covered in shit every day?" he says. "You call that a life? You want to fight to the death to keep that? They should have been having a f***ing party when they closed the mines. They should have gone Brilliant. I never have to go down that f***ing shit hole ever again and neither does my kid. How fantastic is that?'"

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AHEAD of the 2001 general election, his mother wrote a newspaper article saying she had lost faith with New Labour and might vote Liberal Democrat. Last year, Westwood announced that she was switching her support to David Cameron's Conservatives "because he's not Gordon Brown". Corre, meanwhile, rejected an MBE offered by Tony Blair's government on the grounds that Blair was "morally corrupt". And it seems he also shares his mother's views on the current prime minister.

"I think he is completely tainted. He's just been content to sit in the wings waiting for his turn to be prime minister almost so he can put it on his CV. And what has he done since he got in? There's nothing inspiring about the guy. With somebody like him you don't feel there's anything authentic about him, or trustful about him, so I don't really have any respect for him."

A child of McLaren's, then, certainly - but Thatcher? More so than he thinks, perhaps.

Corre's personal life may have taken a battering recently, but the company he created goes from strength to strength. After posting a loss in 2006, Agent Provocateur went into the black last year and the 3i deal has further underlined its solidity. There will soon be more perfumes to roll out, more underwear to make and sell, more advertising campaigns to dream up and more shoppers to scandalise with risque shop window displays such as the election special in which a scantily clad model held a sign saying "Vote AP to get your member in".

I know by now what Joseph Corre thinks of his own product. A lot, basically. What I don't know is the extent to which he takes it to his skin, as it were. Does he, perhaps, wear the product he is so evangelical about? There's a loaded pause when I ask where he gets his pants. "I usually buy them in Selfridges," he says slowly. "I avoid M&S."

I don't imagine Leather Lane market gets much of his custom either.