In the 1990s, Michelle Mone saw an opportunity. She was in her late 20s, so the story goes, on holiday with her young family in Florida, and flicking through a magazine, when she saw an advert for the “Monique”: a breast-enhancing bra insert, or what we’d now call a chicken fillet. It sounds like the unlikely start of a business empire, but what began there would ultimately grow into Ultimo, the lingerie brand established by Mone and her first husband, Michael. For a time it looked set to compete with the big guns of the underwear world. The Rise and Fall of Michelle Mone is a gripping two-part documentary, which first examines how Mone rose to fame and entered the heart of the political establishment, before moving on to look at her more recent nosedive into scandal and a different sort of notoriety, in next week’s episode.
As Mone built her brand of bras out of a small warehouse in Glasgow, she also constructed her own legend. This is a tale of tits and assets, then, but in the way that all great BBC documentaries can be, it is also a story of culture and politics, and a broad portrait of an era, as well as a focused portrait of a person. Mone found success and fame during the late 90s, at the tail-end of Cool Britannia, in a decade still flashing the Vs of girl power, its cleavage squeezed in, up and out. By all accounts, Mone knew how to spin a yarn and put that talent to good use. Ultimo was pitched as the plucky Scottish David to the big lingerie Goliaths such as Gossard and Playtex. The documentary reports she liked to claim that Julia Roberts wore an Ultimo bra in the movie Erin Brockovich, a tale which passed into myth. The costume designer on the film denied this. Publicly, she was seen as a tough, tenacious girl-done-good in the largely male world of big business.
