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Zoe Williams takes a critical look at the marketing behind 50 shades of grey. We have to ask, however: who would buy 50 shades loungewear?

The author of Fifty Shades of Grey, EL James, has signed three licensing deals to create themed clothes, a range of T-shirts, hoodies, tights, daywear, pyjamas, loungewear and underwear. The Telegraph noted that, as its central character Anastasia Steele spends most of her time naked, “we can’t fathom what the range will be based on”. This is because they haven’t read the second and third volumes of the trilogy which, having moved on from the nuts and bolts of dominant-submissive sex, are basically shopping lists. Long, meandering passages of wish fulfillment – if you had a billionaire boyfriend, what would you want him to buy you next? There’s so much Wi-Fi enabled Apple paraphernalia that at times it reads like an Apple catalogue written by a computer- generated sexbot. There are also large amounts of clothes, underwear, loungewear, office wear, everything your cut-out-and-keep everygirl might need for her sexual awakening.

Illustration: Matt Kenyon