Since July 22, the brand known internationally as Maison Close has stepped fully into its new identity — a name that carries with it 1932, Robert Perrier, René Gruau, a particular shade of red, and an understanding of the female silhouette that rewrote what lingerie was permitted to be. SCANDALE, formerly Maison Close, now holds both histories as one. 

BEFORE LYCRA, THERE WAS SCANDALE 

The story begins in a very specific kind of France — poised between Lyon's silk industry and Paris's haute couture ateliers, where material was not simply cloth but conviction. Robert Perrier, who founded SCANDALE in 1932, supplied exceptional silks to Chanel, Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Balenciaga, Jean Patou and Givenchy. Then he did something more interesting: he turned those materials inward. Toward the body. Toward the intimate. 

Long before Lycra arrived to domesticate the idea, Perrier transformed liquid latex into fibre and gave birth to the first modern elasticated girdle — not as constraint, but as its precise opposite. A liberation from the rigidity of traditional corsetry. A new vocabulary for how a silhouette could move, breathe, be revealed. 

SCANDALE became the symbol of a more supple, lighter, freer femininity. The house understood early — in the way that only the most visionary houses ever do — that image is not separate from innovation. René Gruau, the legendary illustrator whose brushstrokes helped define the visual grammar of mid-century French glamour, designed SCANDALE's iconic logo and the campaigns that extended its reach across France and the United States. Red became a manifesto. The leg became an emblem. The name itself — SCANDALE — became the house's most elegant provocation. 

TWENTY YEARS OF CLOSE 

What Nicolas Busnel built with Maison Close, starting in 2006 in Marseille, belongs to a different lineage — but not a different instinct. 

Maison Close was always a question of gaze. Of what is shown versus what is suggested. Of structure as seduction. Of transparency as language. Of the body as architecture to be dressed with intention rather than convention. Over two decades, the house expanded its territory without ever losing its gravitational center: a singular vision of intimacy, approached with the rigor and restraint you'd apply to any serious artistic practice. 

The brand embedded itself in fashion's imagination the way only certain houses do — through the people who chose to wear it, and through the way it photographed. Kate Moss. Madonna. The flash of fluorescent fabric beneath Rosalía's skirts at the BRIT Awards. Miley Cyrus's album artwork. These are not marketing moments. They are cultural ones — the kind that accumulate quietly into something that outlasts any single season.

The United States became the house's largest market, ahead of France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Italy. America's appetite for European luxury with a relentless creative point of view found something here it recognized in itself. 

THE OBVIOUS CHOICE 

When Busnel acquired SCANDALE in October 2025, the logic was almost too clean to be accidental. 

"SCANDALE has always been part of my world of inspiration, as much for its creations as for its communication," he said at the time of the announcement. "The illustrated campaigns by René Gruau left a deep mark on my imagination and my vision of French femininity. When Erik Ryd offered me the opportunity to take over the brand, I saw it as both an obvious choice and an immense honour." 

Two creative lineages. One shared DNA: the conviction that intimacy — approached with intelligence, with discipline, with a French instinct for what to reveal and what to withhold — is one of the most potent territories available to fashion. That suggestion carries more charge than exposure. That mystery, held with confidence, is more arresting than spectacle. 

RUE CAMBON. THIS SEASON. 

The first permanent SCANDALE flagship has just opened on Paris's Rue Cambon — a street that needs no explanation to anyone who has ever thought seriously about French fashion. It is the house's first dedicated physical expression of this next chapter: a threshold between a legacy reclaimed and a story still being written. 

For those already within the universe of Maison Close, it feels like recognition. For those entering for the first time, it is an arrival worth making. 

The last creations signed by Maison Close remain available — collector's pieces now, artifacts of a first twenty years that deserve to be marked as such. Before SCANDALE fully takes the stage. 

Everything forward, from here, carries the name that waited.

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