Seamstress, mistress, distress, stress

Interview, Nov, 1998 by Louise (American artist) Bourgeois

Madame Joly - who had a damaged hip that made her wobble from left to right as she walked and whose husband accompanied me on the metro to the Lycee Fenelon, the all - girls school I was attending in Paris - would make parities for me. There was also Flandrin, who would make eyes at my father while fixing his pants and wonder why he was sleeping with everyone but her. Flandrin was not fair game because she worked for my mother and was therefore chasse garde, meaning off-limits.

I was brought up in a dysfunctional and promiscuous family setup where no one would talk about sex. There was not even a question of a crush on anybody. On the surface, sex simply did not exist. But in fact, we thought of nothing else. My father slept around with everyone, including Sadie, our English tutor who lived in the house. She was his mistress. The seamstress and the mistress were managing the roost.

When it came to me, my parents had a chastity belt obsession: My orifices were always covered. This chastity belt obsession of theirs expressed itself in the cutting, sewing, and tailoring of clothes for me. My lingerie was made in the lingerie room.

There was a white cotton undergarment with a solid front section from the crotch up. Attached to this were two straps that buttoned to the back panel, which had a flap that could be unbuttoned to go to the bathroom. There was lace here and there as an adornment to please me, but this was not the real purpose of the garment.

My mother was in charge of my undergarments, and my father bought the dresses, the coats, and the hats. My parents liked to dress me, and my father wanted me to be elegant. I dressed in Poiret and Chanel.

In 1927, right before a photograph of my class at the Lycee Fenelon was taken, I stopped into the hairdresser situated between the Gare du Luxembourg and the lycee to have my hair trimmed. At the time, the fashionable coiffure was to have the hair cut short and shaved very high on the back of the neck - "a la garconne." When the photograph came out, I was surprised to see that I was the only girl in the entire class to go to the hairdresser. It made me feel like a man chaser, and I felt terribly guilty. I scratched my face out of the photograph.

Much later on, I was working at the Grand Chaumiere, where I would hire models to pose for the drawing classes. Now most of these models were prostitutes who dressed all in black lingerie. They were fastidiously clean and always giving me advice on how to style myself to look sexier.

Once I was at the Ecole des Beaux Arts drawing a male model when suddenly he had an erection. He was so embarrassed, and yet I thought it was wonderful. What a fantastic thing - to be naked and to reveal your vulnerability so publicly.