Françoise Mouly

Early life

Mouly was born in 1955 in Paris, France, the second of three daughters to Josée and Roger Mouly. She grew up in the 17th arrondissement of Paris. Her father was a plastic surgeon who in 1951 developed, with Charles Dufourmentel, the Dufourmentel-Mouly method of breast reduction.

From a young age Mouly had a love of reading, including novels, illustrated fairytale collections, comics magazines such as Pilote, and comics albums such as Tintin. She excelled as a student, and her parents planned to have her study medicine and follow her father into plastic surgery. She spent vacation time assisting and observing her father at work. She was troubled with the ethics of plastic surgery, though, which she said "exploits insecurity to such a high degree".

At thirteen, Mouly witnessed the May 68 events in France. The events led Mouly's mother and sisters to flee Paris. Mouly's father stayed in Paris to be available to his patients, and Mouly stayed as his assistant. She developed sympathies with the anarchists, and read the weekly radical Hara-Kiri Hebdo. She brought her radical leftist politics with her when her parents sent her in 1970 to the Lycée Jeanne D'Arc in central France, where she has said she was expelled "twenty-four or twenty-five times because [she] was trying to drag everyone to demonstrations".

Mouly's father was disappointed when, upon Mouly's return to Paris, she chose to forgo medicine to study architecture at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. She lived with a boyfriend in the Latin Quarter and traveled widely in Europe, took a two-and-a-half-month van trip with friends in 1972 that reached Afghanistan, and made a solo trip to Algeria in 1974 to study the vernacular architecture, during which she was robbed of her passport and money.

Mouly grew disenchanted with the lack of creative freedom a career in architecture would present her. Her family life had grown stressful, and her parents divorced in 1974. The same year, she broke off her studies and worked as a cleaner in a hotel to save money for traveling to New York.