Scandale, formerly Maison Close, turns twenty in grand style. It has opened its first boutique on rue Cambon, where couture has long kept its most coveted addresses, and staged a celebratory show at the Théâtre du Trianon, the historic Parisian music hall. Its founder and artistic director Nicolas Busnel keeps on pairing playful seduction with impressive, meticulous savoir-faire, from engineered stockings to reinvented corsetry.
What is more attractive than self-confidence? The answer arrived early at the Trianon, in an atmosphere at once glamorous, electric and entirely at ease. That ease is what the House sets out to give, and it takes serious craft to achieve. Nicolas Busnel founded Maison Close in Marseille in 2006. Twenty years later he still steers its artistic vision, and his designs have been worn by Kate Moss, Madonna and Miley Cyrus. In October 2025 he acquired Scandale, a historic French lingerie name dating from 1932, and on 22 July his House took it as its own. The opening of the flagship on rue Cambon and the evening at the Trianon introduce the new name to Paris. Bunel’s approach reaches well beyond the garment. He builds his collections as immersive worlds of story, imagery, film and music, playful and nostalgic for the scandalous excess of the 1920s. He designed the House’s cut and curled stocking to lengthen the leg, revived the triangle bra and turned the catsuit into a signature piece. Behind it all lies one ambition, to give women what the suit gives men, a sense of confidence and power.
For its anniversary, the House chose performance, its first source of inspiration. Savary & Zaffuto, the duo behind the erotic cabaret Fantasma at the Folies Bergère, directed the show, with the singer and actress Élodie Frégé as mistress of ceremonies. Ten tableaux, each anchored in a collection, moved from Rococo Dance Bar to Fetish Addiction, carried by a cast of more than a dozen performers. Solo acts punctuated the evening, performers suspended from straps and chains, a handstand on a small round stage, a figure draped over a red motorbike in smoke, all beneath a mirror ball and a velvet curtain. The performers were the proof of the evening. They wore lingerie as a decision rather than a costume, and it was visible that what they wore gave them confidence, and that the confidence travelled across the stage to the audience.
That assurance has a construction, and the stage made it legible. Sheer mesh was cut with teardrop openings, garters sat visibly against the skin, and glossy stockings and long gloves finished each silhouette. Since 2007 the House has refined its legwear, from the cut and curled stocking, with its rolled edge that lengthens the leg, to seamed nylon in distinctive finishes and layered sheers that play with transparency. Its collections are built as much as imagined, with the iridescent foil of Blue Angel inspired by the morpho butterfly, the golden cross of Inspiration Divine, and the interchangeable straps of Corps à Corps. Rococo, launched in February, returns to the historic codes of corsetry through structure, archive and transparency.
Perhaps that is the real craft of the House, and the least visible one. It hones the moment when a woman looks at herself and likes what she sees. The programme closed on a promise, “Desire goes on”, and on this evidence so does the savoir-faire behind it.
