La Parisienne – neuf heures

It depicts a woman stepping out of her car, parked beside a Parisian streetlamp. A resolutely modern illustration!

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, he supplied high-quality silks to Coco Chanel in the 1920s, an activity he continued for more than thirty years — until 1967 — supplying 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 now held in 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 postwar advent of Lycra, Robert Perrier pioneered the transformation of liquid latex into fiber, giving rise to the first elastic girdle and thereby helping to free women from the constraints of traditional 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 underwear.

The brand was also the first to use illustration in advertising, entrusting 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).