Louise Bourgeois liked noticeable clothes that said something. For a Robert Mapplethorpe shoot in 1982, she wore a dark, rock-and-roll-ish monkey fur jacket accessorized with one of her pieces, Fillette—a large plaster penis covered in latex—tucked under her arm. Mapplethorpe described the experience as “surreal,” saying, “You couldn’t, sort of tell her too much, she was just there.” In a 2008 Guardian interview about the shoot, Bourgeois said, “People seem to like it very much because they thought Robert and I were both ‘naughty.’” In 2009, her portrait was taken by the Dutch photographer Alex Van Gelder; the famous image shows her wearing a cocoonlike, ultra-luxe white fur jacket and a black beanie pulled over her head. The two had been friends since the 1940s, based on their mutual love of African art. He declared that Bourgeois wanted him to take her picture because he was “sexy, and she liked sexy people.” Her playful relationship with clothes, image, and fashion revealed as much as the art she made about this truth-telling woman. In a 2008 documentary about her, The Spider, The Mistress, and The Tangerine, she chooses to wear an oversized hot pink fun-fur coat topped with a sequined peaked cap and later a Huggy Bear pimp number. The clothes she chose accentuated Bourgeois’s exuberance and engagement with the camera.
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Louise Bourgeois with her marble sculpture Eye to Eye, 1970.
Born in Paris on Christmas Day 1911, Bourgeois even as a young girl was dressed by her parents in Parisian designer garb. The fights they had about her clothes became fuel for artistic inspiration, she said in a 1997 New York Times interview. She explained that her 1996 work Blue Days (a collection of hanging dresses) and a similar piece from 1997, Pink Days and Blue Days (which displayed her own and her family’s clothes stuffed and hung on a wardrobe organizer), “refer to a period when my mother and father would argue about who would put the best clothes on me. One would say ‘I bought her Poiret’ and the other would say ‘I bought her Chanel.’ She is better in Chanel and my Chanel is better than your Poiret.”
After her father died in 1951, Bourgeois suffered from depression and was in therapy for the next thirty years, stopping only when her doctor died in 1982.
Bourgeois held salons in her New York apartment where students could bring their art to be critiqued. She used to call the events “Sunday, Bloody Sunday.”
It’s unsurprising that the connection between Bourgeois and the fashion world is passionate. In a 2015 interview with Dazed and Confused, her assistant, Jerry Gorovey, noted, “You could see her father was dapper and stylish, so her relationship with clothes and society was very important to her growing up.” Her parents restored antique tapestries, and Bourgeois explained in a 2008 Observer interview that “from the tapestries, I got this large sense of scale. I learned their stories, the use of symbolism and art history. The restoration of the tapestries functioned on a psychological level as well. By this I mean that things that have broken down or have been ripped apart can be joined and mended. My art is a form of restoration in terms of my feelings to myself and to others.”
In a 2008 New York Times article discussing fashion’s place in the artist’s work, Bourgeois is quoted as saying, “You can retell your life and remember your life by the shape, weight, color and smell of those clothes in your closet,” a sentiment made three-dimensional by her installations. Clothes were vital both to her art and her psyche. In 1978, Bourgeois exhibited her breakthrough performance piece A Banquet/A Fashion Show of Body Parts. At sixty-seven—buoyed by the strengthening of global feminism and the art world’s newfound embrace of diversity—she was hitting her stride and embarking on an inspired path.
Among the other works she showed at this exhibition was a bulbous rubber costume that distorted the wearer’s body. One can read a similar message in Rei Kawakubo’s Lumps and Bumps collection of 1997. Since then, and culminating in the 2017 Comme des Garçons exhibition at the Met, many have observed distinct connections between Bourgeois and Kawakubo, among the most imaginative of designers. That same year, Barneys curated its windows in homage to both creatives, Barneys curator Dennis Freedman explaining that he found “strong similarities in the forms they make, and a lot of it deals with the body and women’s bodies in particular—exaggeration, deconstruction.”
Kawakubo is far from the only designer to click conceptually with Bourgeois. The artist was great friends with the Austrian designer Helmut Lang, who admitted to feeling a “strong emotional and unconditional bond” with Bourgeois. They collaborated on a 2003 limited edition T-shirt called What Is the Shape of This Song? Lang also used a remade version of her 1940s Shackle Necklace in one of his catwalk shows as well as images of the artist in his advertising campaigns. In 1998, the two worked with Jenny Holzer on an exhibition for the Vienna Kunsthalle. Lang said in 2007 that “when I met her she didn’t leave her house anymore, so she had comfortable clothes she would wear every day, such as a long-sleeved T-shirt with six pocket eyes. She likes to keep the extravagant pieces for special occasions such as photo shoots or when she has company she cares about.” This echoes Jerry Gorovey’s observation in the Guardian: “At a certain point in the 1990s she basically started wearing the same outfit. It was always black: a uniform. When I look back at these photographs, she dressed in a very different way to when I first met her in 1980, when she had certain colors she liked: blue, white, pink.”
I only work when I feel the need to express something. I may not be sure of exactly what it is, but I know that something is cooking and when I am on the right track. The need is very strong. To express your emotions, you have to be very loose and receptive. The unconscious will come to you, if you have that gift that artists have. I only know if I’m inspired by the results.
—Louise Bourgeois, the Observer (UK), 2009
Getty Images: Yann Gamblin/Paris Match via Getty Images
Louise Bourgeois, New York City, March 1996.
If Louise Bourgeois didn’t like the color of someone’s shirt, she would let them know.
—Jerry Gorovoy, the Guardian, 2016
When designer Simone Rocha opened a New York City shop in 2017, hanging in pride of place was a Bourgeois painting. Rocha drew inspiration for her autumn/winter 2015 collection from the artist. She explained, “I just absolutely love her work and the fact that it’s so personal. Also a lot of it is very textile based, but I love all of her materials—marble, wood, glass, and the contrast of it.” Beyond her textile installations, Bourgeois’s delight with the medium of fashion was also manifested in jewelry designs. Her celebrated spider motif was adapted in brooch form for the Portable Art Project (2008) at the Hauser & Wirth Gallery in London; curated by Celia Forner, the exhibit also featured silver and gold spiraling cuffs created by the artist. In 2018 the exhibition was re-visited by Forner at Hauser & Wirth in New York City showcasing fifteen new artists.