Rue de Rochechouart
In celebration of the centenary of the brassiere, invented by M. Hardt in Dresden in 1889.
Among my early memories
of women taking their clothes off before making love, one
stands out: that of certain modest Parisian prostitutes
who, wishing to maintain their bosoms’ firmness and
elevation, kept on their brassieres while shedding (with
the occasional exception of their stockings) everything
else. The time was the late 1940s. I bow to the memory of
Fräulein Hardt in acknowledgment of this partial
nakedness, which inverts the hierarchy of bodily parts
normally hidden. The vision excited my curiosity not by
its eroticism but as a first glimpse of the ways women
themselves perceive their bodies.
Photographs copyright © Arthur Gerbault, Paris, 1991, 1999, from the book Immeasurable Distances by Harry Mathews, The Lapis Press, Venice, CA,1991, ISBN 0 932499 43 0
You can read other work by Harry Mathews in Issue # 3 of Jacket.