Joe Corre isn't afraid of controversy. Since he and then-wife Serena Rees founded Agent Provocateur in 1994, Corre et al. seem to have positively courted the stuff. Witness the severed cow's head in the windows of AP's original London shop in 2003, which incited indecency charges, or the "Weapons of Mass Distraction" ad campaign aimed at the policies of George Bush and Tony Blair. So, why on earth is a store that sells knickers spending its brand capital ticking people off? According to Corre, lingerie is as good a medium as any for the simple message THINK. "I don't want to tell people what to think," he remarks, "but I do want to make them think. If I can do that [with a] shop window, well, why not?" Their topic du jour cuts closer to the culture's heart than any the label has yet raised: marriage. The new campaign "Let Them Eat Kate" stars AP muse Kate Moss as a bride who tells the cherished institution to fuck off, much to the consternation of screaming popes portrayed by artists Jake and Dinos Chapman. Shot by Nick Knight, the campaign will be shown at the Milk Gallery tomorrow night. Here, Corre talks to Style.com about tabloids, global finance theology, and saying "I don't" to The Big Day.

What made you decide to take on marriage?
This is the first campaign we've done featuring the bridal range. I thought it would be nice to do something special, tell a story. But the story we wound up telling reflects my own ambivalence about marriage. Not the essence of it—I believe that two people could want to express their commitment in a public ceremony. But why hand that expression over to some distant authority? What if, instead, you rejected the authority and made that ceremony really your own? Those were the questions I wanted to raise, and then we worked with Nick to translate them into six images.

I'm guessing that the casting of Kate Moss wasn't coincidental. This is a different kind of vexation of public and private, but she's at the epicenter of the whole tabloid obsession with who's engaged, who's pregnant—all this gossip designed to make us feel like we know celebrities better than we really do.
Kate was central to the concept. We wanted to celebrate her and to comment on the way she's covered in the media. She never chose to be put on a pedestal, but they hoisted her up there. Now any time she behaves like a normal, flawed human being, the media comes at her with all this judgment. She's not a role model, she's a clothes model. Though the media might have it otherwise, the world is not divided up between saints and sinners.

"Scandalized" does seem to be the tabs' default voice.
It's all a massive distraction from what's really going on in the world. And it's all a way of telling people what to believe. Say what you like about the positions Agent Provocateur has taken over the years, but we've never shouted down anyone's throat. Our aim is to shock people into thinking for themselves. At the end of the day, you can either believe, or you can think. But you can't have it both ways.

Honestly, though—isn't Agent Provocateur kind of having it both ways? You lob critiques at the culture, but you cast Kate Moss in your ads, all in the service of selling lingerie, isn't it?
Look, this is an era in which the only real power an individual has is the power to choose what to buy and what not. Where you spend your money, that's a political decision. I like to know where the brands I buy from stand on the issues that mean something to me. My guess is that the woman who buys Agent Provocateur may not always agree with our politics, but she appreciates that we're willing to raise questions. Of course, we're part of the game of consumption. But just because you're part of the game doesn't mean you can't question it.

That's a risky strategy. Haven't you ever worried about going too far? Marriage, for example, makes for a large but dangerous target.
We're taking on more than marriage. It goes back to that question of believing rather than thinking. Anytime you hand over your own experience to some outside authority, you're in the realm of belief. That applies to the church and it applies to government. And it applies to the whole situation in the financial markets right now. Play the metaphor out. For these past few years, we believed in the global economy, primarily because a few bankers believed that the people to whom they sold sub-prime mortgages would pay them back. They no longer believe that. What's more, now the bankers don't even believe each other. The whole house of cards has come tumbling down. We're in a moment of mass disillusionment.

Is that to the good or the bad?
Oh, the reckoning is overdue. My hope is we'll all start to dig deeper for our ideas. Agent Provocateur opened its first shop back in '94, in the midst of the last real recession in England. I think a large part of our identity and a great deal of our success come out of the fact that we launched a brand that asked questions at a time when everyone was ready to hear them. That, and people liked the underwear.