La Parisienne – dix heures

It depicts a woman holding a bouquet at the flower market on the Île de la Cité, with a view of the Conciergerie in the background.

The lingerie brand Scandale was founded in Paris in 1932 by Robert Perrier. A great connoisseur of rare fabrics, as well as a songwriter and art collector, Perrier supplied high-quality silks to Coco Chanel in the 1920s, an activity he pursued for more than thirty years — until 1967 — providing some of the most sought-after luxury fabrics to the houses of Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Balenciaga, Jean Patou and Givenchy. Several of his silks are today held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musée de la Mode et du Textile in Lyon and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

He also introduced synthetic fabrics into French haute couture, a great novelty at the time, which he developed in particular for women’s lingerie. This was the birth of Scandale: before the advent of Lycra, in the postwar years, Robert Perrier pioneered the transformation of liquid latex into fiber, giving rise to the first elastic girdle and helping to free women from the constraints previously imposed by corsetry. Bold, sensual and colorful, the brand and its “rouge scandale” had a considerable impact on the fashion industry and on the way women wore undergarments.

The brand was also the first to use illustration in advertising, entrusting the poster artist René Gruau with the design of its emblematic logo, then Pierre Couronne, Diaz and Jean Jacquelin (between 1950 and 1960) with the direction of several advertising campaigns, in France and the United States. Scandale was recently relaunched, in 2021.

A very fine colored version in gouache.