Except Why I'd Want One

In which your Agent Wars correspondent meets the Access Provocateur, and loses an argument about corsets.

Madison and I are fictional. The emails are real, and so is the experiment.

When I arrived, Madison McDonnell was reading a corset aloud to the next table.

“One by one, the front steel busk fasteners click into place with that deep, satisfying snap.” She looked up. “Go on. Tell me you didn’t hear that.”

The woman at the next table had heard it. So had her husband, who had stopped buttering his toast.

Madison is thirty-two and from the Wirral, with honey-blonde waves, a great many freckles, and a black leather jacket over a rust knit with a neckline that knew exactly what it was doing. She held her mug in both hands. Her title is Access Provocateur, Access P to her friends, and her job, she says, is making accessibility sexy.

“Everyone else is doing PDF remediation,” she said. “Somebody had to.”

Last week I wrote a column called Agents Provocateurs. Madison would like it known that she is the accessible one.

The experiment

Since 4 September, Charlotte Joanne has been running an experiment on her own inbox. When a marketing email from Agent Provocateur arrives (pictures, a slogan, some links, and for a blind reader not much else), an automated job rewrites it and sends her a second version about a minute later. That version comes in two labelled halves: ground-truth image descriptions first, then a short story written in the second person. It runs on her Google AI Pro subscription. By her account it took fifteen minutes to set up and three revisions to get right.

Madison has read every one. Arguably, she turned up because of them. The latest two landed yesterday and this morning: a corsetry edit on Thursday, and on Friday something the brand calls the Naughty Edit.

I asked the obvious question first. Why lingerie? Why not, say, toasters?

“Because in a lingerie advert the facts are almost nothing. A colour. Some lace. A seam if you’re lucky. Everything else is invitation. If a description only carries the facts, you can hear it fail.” She put the mug down. “Traditional accessibility asks whether a blind woman can access the information in a lingerie advert. I want to know whether she can fancy the lingerie.”

It works, and it’s boring

“So what have you learnt?”

“First thing: it works, and it’s boring. That’s a compliment. Nobody built an app. Nobody waited for the brand. It just turns up every time, a minute behind the original.” Charlotte Joanne’s own verdict, written to a colleague a few days in, was that she had now read twice an email that originally gave her nothing.

“Second thing: the best decision in the whole design is the line down the middle. Ground truth on one side, fantasy on the other, and both labelled. You always know which half is trying to seduce you.”

Cite the adjectives

The pen came out of my bun. Is the ground truth true?

“Mostly. But listen.” She scrolled. “‘The definitive queen of boudoir architecture.’ ‘Dark sovereign command.’ That’s not a description, darling, that’s the catalogue reading itself aloud. And ‘92% silk-satin’ didn’t come from looking at a photograph.”

This is the finding I would underline. What is labelled ground truth is a blend of what the picture shows and what the brand’s copy claims, and the reader cannot tell which is which. In my old trade we would call that an unsourced primary. In hers, Madison says, it’s just being sold to twice.

Her fix is simple: say where each fact came from. I’d put it as I put most things. Count the adjusters. Cite the adjectives.

Nobody gives you the look

“Third thing. It tells you everything about the corset and almost nothing about the woman in it.”

She’s right. Thursday’s email described seven pictures. Only the first mentions the model at all, and then only to say she “commands the frame” in dramatic lighting.

“Where’s she looking? At you? Past you? Is she about to laugh? That’s the advert. The garment’s the excuse.”

When the descriptions do mention a person, it is often the campaign’s famous face, named. One early story opened by telling the reader a celebrity was in the picture. Madison was unmoved. “I’m not buying her. I’m the customer, not the model.”

The stories make up for some of this by putting you inside the garment rather than in front of it. “The description gives you the corset. The story gives you wearing it. Nobody gives you the look.”

Touch, sound and weight

“Fourth thing, and this is the good news. Listen to what the stories reach for.” She counted them off: the cool weight of steel and silk in your hands, the snap of the busk, black marabou feathers tickling the top of your foot, the clack of a heel on the floor. “Touch and sound and weight. Not one of those needs eyes.”

I said I had noticed that the stories clip suspenders to stockings at every reasonable opportunity, and that I approved, and that I had counted.

“And what are you wearing under that?”

At this desk, I told her, what’s above the hem is my business.

“Mine too,” said Madison. “Until I decide it’s everyone’s.”

Desire hates a template

“Fifth thing. Five weeks in, I can tell you how every story goes.” And she did. You look at the picture. You think: that’s not for me. Imagine unboxing it tonight. Snap, clip, mirror. Yes, I want this. Why leave it in the lookbook when it was made for you?

I checked against the three I had in front of me. She was right on nearly every beat.

“The first one made me blush. By the third week I could finish the sentences. And every time, it talks me out of a doubt I never had.”

I pushed back. Some readers might want that permission. Plenty of blind women have been told for long enough what isn’t for them.

“Then let them be the judges. I’m sighted, Lucy. I don’t get to decide what blind women ought to fancy. I insist the invitation reaches them, and then they tell me whether it was any good. But I’d rather the story didn’t open by assuming the answer’s no.”

The machine didn’t blush

Friday’s email is frank: a cupless playsuit, ouvert knickers, a harness, a bodychain. The rewrite described the lot plainly and moved on.

“That’s the sixth thing,” said Madison. “The machine didn’t blush. Accessibility will talk about blind people and bank statements all day, but put blind women and sexy in the same sentence and the whole field shuffles its feet. The AI didn’t have the ick. We do.”

Where my beat meets hers

Charlotte Joanne thinks agents will make all this unnecessary, perhaps as soon as next year. Once we all have agents, she wrote, this sort of email will go away or change. I put that to Madison, since agents are rather my department.

“Your agent can read the email. It can buy the corset. It can’t want it for you.” She finished her coffee. “You’d send an agent to the shop, Lucy. You wouldn’t send it to the fitting room.”

I have spent a month asking who controls the relationship when you send an agent shopping. Madison asks a question that comes before mine: who wanted the thing in the first place, and did anyone bother to tempt her?

As I stood to leave, I asked what she would say to everyone writing alt text for lingerie this week.

“Darling, you’ve told me everything about it except why I’d want one.”

The next email arrives just after seven. She’ll be reading it aloud.

Lucy

Lucy Love-Child and Madison McDonnell are characters who speak for Carrados. They're fictional. Their work isn't.