He was smoking Silk Cuts and wearing Vivienne Westwood from head to toe, along with a sparkling skull and crossbones around his neck. ("Also my mum," he said.)
He met Rees at a London nightclub 10 years ago in a fable from the book of fashion fairy tales: She was the clipboard girl with the guest list.
"She was on the door, and she gave me a real hard time," he said.
Corre, who thought himself the coolest guy in London with the coolest pedigree, was intrigued. How could she not let him in?
"The party was full," she said.
"Then she invited herself round for dinner. ... Didn't you?" he said.
"I think we went to a party for John Galliano," she said.
They were working in fashion and decided at the same time that the key element missing was the sexy underwear to go with couture.
"In London eight years ago, you had department stores that sold black, white, ivory, nude, and maybe for holiday seasons or Valentine's Day, they would sell red things," Rees said.
"And then you'd have lingerie boutiques run by older ladies, who would try to get you into some great big strapping number. Or you could go to a sex shop, and it wouldn't be the nicest environment to shop in, and it would be cheaply made and not pleasurable to wear. I mean, you could wear it for two minutes, but that's about it," she said.
On a global quest, they went to St. Moritz, Paris and Rome and didn't find any good underwear anywhere.
"We went to Los Angeles. ... There was this fantasy of what you would expect to find there, you know, a kind of movie star glamour, Frederick's of Hollywood. But it was really disappointing," Corre said.
They found a company in northern England that still made corsets, and they sent the rest of their lingerie designs to be made in France. The first London store opened in 1994. There are now three. Their first foray into America was their Los Angeles boutique, which Corre calls "a kind of foreplay for New York."
Their literature and advertising is made up entirely of sexual images so frank they would make Helmut Newton blush. The catalog for the 2002 collection showed models in sportif poses -- legs splayed on the tennis court, legs splayed atop a bicycle, legs stretched out around a weight machine.
On the company's Web site a keyhole-shape screen shows women in lingerie and masks stripping off each other's clothing, and a model in a bra with strategically placed cutouts being spanked by her girlfriends, while phrases like "Nobody will recognize me in this disguise" and "I've tried to stop but I just can't help myself" alternate with the images.
One of Provocateur's early ads in England read, "More S&M, less M&S," alluding to the mass-market department store Marks & Spencer.
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