sethson.com » Mannequins

Display Mannequin for Shops and Store Windows

Brian — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 01:09:10 +0000

You see them in shopping malls. You see them in haberdasheries decked out in the finest suits. You see them staring out at you from jewelry shops, wearing all manner of finery. They wear the latest from the top fashion houses like Dior or Versace, Armani or Chanel. You can also sometimes spot them in sports stores, all dressed up to go swimming, skiing, camping, or to play basketball, football, or hockey, or rarely in a special gathering, lounging about but never leaving. Yet for some reason, you never hear about them on the news, and you never get to read any interviews featuring them. Why?

That’s easy. They’re display mannequins, meant to model products in such a manner to arouse your interest and persuade you into buying them.

Origins of Visual Merchandising

Mannequins, in one form or another, have been around for thousands of years. In the Middle Ages, their precursors were called lay figures used for dress making and fitting to avoid potential embarrassment of the nobility during these procedures. The dressmaker would fit it to the dress form instead since it matched the august personage’s exact measurements. From this practice was developed the technique of draping. The dress form could also be used to show the finished product off to the client.

In the 1700s, it was also popular to trade ‘fashion dolls.’ These were fairly lifelike dolls decked out in the latest fashion trends – kind of like a Barbie doll, fashion catalog and a ‘how-to-sew’ instruction book all rolled into one. Ranging in size from 1 inch to life, they were the means for spreading what was trendy and what was not in that age. Since these dolls were often given away and literally reused until they fell to bits, no examples of them exist today.

Kinds of Display Mannequins

When the Industrial Age came, the middle class gained more wealth, and the dress forms changed to accommodate their desires for the same function once available only to the nobility. shop mannequins started to appear in window spaceswearing the day’s fashions. When they started to imitate famous personalities and cultural and somatic ideals of the period instead of ‘down-home’ characters, dress mannequins became popular enough that people would often go out just to see the latest window displays, hence the term “window shopping.” Through the years, the mannequin, from the earliest wood and wax creation, to today’s articulated fiberglass-and-plastic adjustable mannequin, whether it be a female mannequin, male mannequin, adult mannequin, or child mannequin, meant to sell something or just as a decorative mannequin has always been a reflection of and a statement on the society that made it.

Collecting Decorative Mannequins and Dummies

Brian — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 01:08:48 +0000

We are most familiar with mannequins as tools for selling products, but they have always been used for other purposes. Look in a large art supply and crafts store, and you’ll probably find artists’ dummies about a foot high and articulated mannequins which are used to help artists correctly model the human form in pencil, ink or paint. Commercial software like Poser duplicates this function, but in the digital realm. There are also the mannequins that carry out some person’s whimsy such as the larger-than-life Peanuts characters that were recently placed in public places around creator Charles Schultz’s hometown or the display mannequin that highlights a pub or a club and no doubt gives nervous guys something else to chat with women about besides the weather.

Mannequins for Ornamentation

Still another type of decorative mannequin can be found in homes. These are creations which, being of practical utility or not, are attractive enough to display and use as ornamentation. These might include something like an fetching dress mannequin posed in period clothing, standing in a corner, or a caryatid-like construction holding aloft a lamp. Another example would be the mannequin dressed in the clothes its owner was wearing during his heyday – say, a retired military officer with a small display to commemorate his service.

What is This That I See Before Me?

Some people, in fact, collect mannequins for themselves. Some go for specific types. Others collect all of a particular era or a particular type. For instance, female mannequins made in the 1980s show how tall heels were during that decade or wire mannequins that were popular before the more realistic plaster forms began to supplant them. Some people collect adult mannequins, child mannequins or celebrity mannequins. Still others are partial to hair mannequins to display different hairdos and/or wigs. But some people can’t stand being around something so life-like yet inanimate. This is probably explained by the Uncanny Valley effect as stated in 1982 by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori – the apparent humanity of mannequins leads us to empathize with them, but when the simulation reaches a certain point, some people can’t help but feel that something is just not right. That’s what the Uncanny Valley is about.

Speaking of robots, one could probably consider them the descendants of those first lay figures. There are already robotic mannequins that react to onlookers. Maybe we’ll soon see those store windows alive with battery-powered movement, silently showing us another reflection of ourselves.

Male and Female Shop Display Mannequins

Brian — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 01:08:25 +0000

Shop mannequins are a familiar sight to most people. Whereas a dress mannequin‘s role is to wear clothing as a display mannequin, lay figure or dress form to help the clothes maker, and a jewelry mannequin performs either as a display for rings, pendants, brooches and other finery or is just a stylized hanger for these, a shop mannequin is more varied in its duties. It can function as a dress mannequin or be used as a decorative mannequin at home or in a store or other establishment.

Art and Form, Enterprise and Insurgent

Shop mannequins come in a wide variety of styles and are made with a wide variety of materials. In the pre-Industrial Age days, they were made of wood and covered in fabric. To give them shape then, they were stuffed with sawdust, cotton waste or similar material. They were fitted with metal feet to help them stand. A life-size dummy then would weigh anywhere between 200 to 300 pounds, requiring another dummy to carry it from place to place. One can imagine how difficult they were to maintain and use.

Eventually wood gave way to wire, and wire mannequins, in turn, gave way to plaster creations that graced the theater-like windows of shops. Thanks to pioneers like Cora Scovil and Lester Gaba, mannequins became popular as visual merchandising tools. Posed in store windows by themselves or as part of tableaus, at turns, they promoted their times’ ideas about society and beauty, railed against the establishment, enjoined their viewers to buy into the latest societal trends, or encouraged them to think about things they often took for granted.

Frozen Ideas of Change

Their representations run the gamut of the human race, from children to adults, common folk to celebrities. When voluptuous figures were in, female mannequins mimicked that. When Twiggy became popular in the 1960s, mannequins changed to accommodate that, too. Mannequins made in the 1990s reflect that era’s emphasis on physical health. Most mannequins were decidedly Caucasian before, but now, they also depict other ethnicities. The introduction of modern technologies led to the creation of fiberglass mannequins, and they, in turn, have largely freed the mannequin maker from material limitations, making all this possible. There are now even shop mannequins in Japan – which also originated the Uncanny Valley explanation of why some people find these creations so disturbing – that react to the movements of passersby, also noting their gender and age for marketing purposes.

Old and New Wire Dress Mannequins

Brian — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 01:08:02 +0000

The mannequin has been an art form and a business tool handed down through history. Back in history, people didn’t have the high-tech materials we have today, so things like fiberglass mannequins or adjustable mannequins were out of the question. One of the present-day mannequin’s predecessors, the dress form or lay figure, served as a convenience for the nobility and the tailors of the Middle Ages. Their measurements coincided with the measurements of the customer, thus, freeing them from having to sit around waiting for the tailor or dressmaker to finish his or her task and potentially freeing them from some royal embarrassment as well.

The Change Brought About by Mechanization

Pre-Industrial Age display mannequins were already starting to appear in shop windows by the 1800s. Steel-girder load-bearing building designs allowed more free space between supports, and the electrification of cities meant human activities no longer had to be confined to the hours between sunrise and sunset. Radical store displays featuring stylized people with billiard-ball heads and simplified faces, having caught on after the Paris Exposition of 1925, crossed the Atlantic into America, but the avant-garde designs were too much for some people including Ruth Fleischer, Lester Gaba and Mary Lewis. This eventually led to Gaba’s creations, the six Gaba Girls, who made their mark on New York society and on mannequin design as well.

The Change of Fortunes

Before that, shop displays were devoid of life, with figures that could have been lifted from a waxworks somewhere. The shop mannequins then were made of papier-mâché, wax or wood. They were stuffed to give them shape and were very heavy and unwieldy. Another type of mannequin, the wire mannequin, was used as a jewelry mannequin to hold adornments such as rings, pendants, earrings, necklaces, brooches, and the like for display or to store them, especially at home. Wire mannequins were also used as dress mannequins, perfect to show how that new dress was so fine, how that skirt was so bouffant.

The economics of the times, being what they were and with the demand for realistic mannequins rising in the wake of the Gaba Girls, wire mannequins, which were relatively costly and hard to maintain, were soon supplanted for a large part by plaster and later on fiberglass mannequins. Many examples still survive to this day and are still used in the manner they were intended to. They are often works of art in themselves with flowing outlines sometimes enhanced by wrapping the wire in colored ribbon or plastic.

Cynthia and the History of the Female Mannequin

Brian — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 01:07:39 +0000

In New York in the 1930s, a woman named Cynthia began to appear in famous places such as the Stork Club and at opera houses. Sitting motionless with a cigarette in one hand, she became famous despite never uttering a word or even moving the least bit from her pose.

Going Gaga over the Gaba Girls

Cynthia was a female mannequin designed by the soap sculptor Lester Gaba. He created a line of plaster mannequins known as the Gaba Girls who became famous in New York society and marked the rise to the fore of American mannequin designers. The six Gaba Girls were a departure from their somber predecessors, being personable and realistic in the way the wax mannequins of other stores weren’t. They were dressed in fine clothes and jewelry and were the hit at parties.

Previously, the synergistic effect of the electrification of cities, the introduction of iron and steel in the construction of buildings, the mechanization of dressmaking and the advent of World War I all combined to make the department store with its large front windows suitable for advertising purposes possible. Mannequins began to populate the storefronts once the owners keyed in to the idea of using them to attract customers. They evolved from simple, static life-size dolls in clothing to lithe, posed models that reflected the ideals of female beauty at the time.

Subsequent History

The first shop mannequins, being wood dress forms, papier-mâché mannequins, wire mannequins, had their problems, among them a total weight of somewhere between 200 and 300 pounds. The first plaster models arriving on the scene reduced this to around 30, and with the Gaba Girls and their realistic successors’ appeal, mannequins became a hot new tool for sellers to attract their clientele.

As time has gone on, the mannequin has changed to reflect (or in some cases, challenge) the ideals of beauty and the conditions of society in its milieu. The slender, snobbish 1920s mannequins gave way to creations with boyish charm in the 1930s as well as reasonably-priced abstract creations that could substitute for full mannequins in that hard-luck time. During the Second World War, the mannequin became shorter and its clothes became far simpler, the victim of wartime exigencies. When it ended, smiling and happy creations were seen to grace store windows. The 50s was the era of both the innocent, Lolita-like figure with a suggestive charm, and the tough, sexy vamp, signaling the beginning of the reexamination of feminine identity which continued into the 1970s. Female mannequins also began to show pain, worry and pose in defiant attitudes. In the 1990s and beyond, the growth of the consumer base led the way to other types of mannequins such as ethnic mannequins, child mannequins and plus-size mannequins as well as reflects that era’s concern with health and physical fitness.

Dress Mannequins for Tailors and Dressmakers

Brian — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 01:07:09 +0000

mannequins act in many roles in real life and fiction. Heavily-instrumented versions stand in for real people for tests that the latter would find fatal or at least a heavy burden to the insurance underwriter – think crash test dummies, the silent populace of towns built just so scientists could study them being destroyed in nuclear blasts, and Buster from the popular Discovery Channel series Mythbusters. In the Silent Hill series of video games, they form a convenient substitute to human enemies, suffer from depredations and respond as if they were alive. There are stories of mannequins which come to life and act either as villains or heroes – the movie Mannequin starred lovely Kim Catrall as Andrew McCarthy’s come-alive-at-night love interest. In retail stores, display mannequins of every type, from adult mannequins to child mannequins, both male mannequins and female mannequins, model clothing and accessories, helping drive a multibillion dollar global industry that fulfills one of mankind’s most basic needs. There are also jewelry mannequins and hair mannequins that serve a similar purpose.

What’s a Dress Mannequin?

But the type of mannequin that has probably been around the longest is the dress mannequin. Originating from a simple wooden form in antiquity, in the Middle Ages it was designed as a face- and time-saving implement for aristocrats and their clothes makers. Fitting clothes to the dress form replaced trying them out on the noble and possibly incurring their fickle wrath with an accidental pin prick.

The fashion doll, once used by Henry IV to keep his fiancée Marie de Medici abreast of the latest trends in Parisian haute couture, was in existence in the 1300s and became popular in the 1700s as a way of spreading what was in vogue. It is generally acknowledged to be the forerunner of the mannequin as it is now, but served the additional purposes of being a pattern and of sewing instruction manual, all rolled into one package that could be as small as an inch or be life-size. It is ironic that no examples of this plaything of the nobility and merchant class exist today.

Future Function of Mannequins

Today, virtual mannequins are supplementing and, in some cases, supplanting real mannequins. A virtual reality mannequin created by the Jaguar Formula 1 racing team using a system known as JACK, has enabled them to better design their cars for driver fit and safety and also to allow their crew to service it faster. Doing this saves a lot of money because everything can be tested inside a computer before the costly step of manufacturing prototypes is done. Virtual mannequins also help customers in Japan with picking out and fitting a formal kimono by letting them see what the final product would look like without having to undertake the hour-long process of putting it on.

Head Mannequins for Hair Styling and Design

Brian — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 01:06:47 +0000

Everyone knows what a Barbie doll looks like – well, maybe everyone except a Berber living in the arid lands of North Africa, but that’s another matter. Little girls play with them, dressing them in fashionable clothing, acting out imaginary stories about Barbie’s relationship with Skipper, her other friends, and Ken. In turn, these dolls inculcate the girls with what society believes are desirable traits. In a sense, Barbie is very related to the little well-dressed dolls Henry IV of France sent to Marie de Medici to keep her updated on the latest in Parisian fashions, the forerunners of today’s modern dress mannequins, shop mannequins, and display mannequins.

Practice Haircutting Done on Surrogates

Today’s modern mannequins are not limited to full-body creations. If you were to take Barbie’s head and enlarge it to life-size, with preternaturally long and smooth hair and all, you’d get an idea of what a hair mannequin looks like. Hair mannequins are basically head models on mounts used in the cosmetological industry for practice. They are commonly fiberglass mannequins or plastic mannequins and usually have a face painted on. They can be adult mannequins or child mannequins and can represent any race or skin color. Their crowning glory may be either human hair (as hard to believe as it is, there is a market for human hair) or artificial hair. They are used to practice any number of cosmetology procedures such as haircutting, perming, dyeing, bonding, and layering. They are also used to practice make-up application. This is a much better proposition than the old method of trying it out on a real person and botching it, leading to an encounter with an irate customer. Hair mannequins are considered to be very good tools for cosmetology.

Features of Hair Mannequins

Some practice mannequins are provided with basic eyes and mouth. Other, more sophisticated products come with eyelashes and better-looking facial features as well. These are often reserved for competitions. To steady them, they are often set into a holder or clamp of some kind. There are also some types of hair-bearing mannequins which are used for practicing massage therapy. These can be extended to include the neck and shoulder area, so the user can practice on them, too.

Head mannequins are not limited to cosmetology. Instrumented versions can also be used to test helmet crashworthiness and ballistics. Mannequin-like heads with changing facial features are used to study how people interact with one another.

Adjustable Mannequins for Stores, Shops and Dressmakers

Brian — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 01:06:22 +0000

Probably one of the most well-known appearances of a mannequin in fiction occurs in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Empty House,” in which the famous literary master of detection Sherlock Holmes avoids getting a pistol-caliber bullet in his skull by diverting his enemy, crack shot Sebastian Moran, with a bust in wax, executed by ‘Monsieur Oscar Meunier of Grenoble,’ seated in Holmes’ quarters at 221B Baker Street. To further deceive his enemies, Holmes has his landlady Mrs. Hudson change the mannequin’s pose every eight minutes.

Roles of Adjustable Mannequins

In real life, an adjustable mannequin is often employed for more prosaic uses such as in store windows. They can be display mannequins, showing of the shop’s wares; dress mannequins, which can be used to help in designing, sewing and storing clothes; or jewelry mannequins, dressed in finery and enticing the viewer into wanting to own the same.

Early mannequins were made inflexibly with wood, wire or wax, but with the advent of the Industrial Age and the premium placed on realism, these were replaced by lightweight creations which could be quickly moved and adjusted to cater to the demands of the store owner or the display.

How Do They Move?

An adjustable mannequin can be moved into different poses through movable joints in the mannequin’s structure or more normally by using detachable, rotatable heads, arms, legs, hands, and feet. With a few changes, a male mannequin shown previously as seated on a chair reading a book can be transformed into one wearing cold-weather clothing and holding up a pair of skis, standing happily beside a female mannequin amid a panorama of styrofoam snowflakes and soap snow. Or a dress form supporting a wedding gown in one display can, with a few adjustments, also be used to show off a plus-size evening dress in another department. This makes the shop mannequin not only the effective visual merchandising tool it already is, it makes it more cost effective, too. Now, the store will not have to stock so many mannequins, each limited to one pose, nor will it have to find the space to store all of them or find the time for their upkeep – a serious matter when your typical fiberglass mannequin, male mannequin or female mannequin, can cost upwards of a hundred dollars.

Today there are articulated mannequins which are able to move through pneumatic, hydraulic or electric means. These liven up attractions like amusement park rides and are beginning to appear in some of the higher-tech department stores.

Jewelry Mannequin Arms, Heads and Bodies

Brian — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 01:05:34 +0000

It’s an axiom commonly encountered in marketing – a company’s image is everything. If one’s going to attempt to entice a customer to part with his or her hard-earned money, chances are the merchant will do much better if he or she seems to be reputable and honest. Just put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Would you buy something from someone who looks shady? Would you even be in a buying mood if you were in some shabby little pit with grimy windows instead of a clean, well-lighted shop?

Image is Everything

Any businessman would do well to heed the lessons learned by the fur industry. Portraying fur as a cruel enterprise founded on the painful deaths of innocent animals and furriers as cold-hearted monsters has had a detrimental effect on the desire to own and thus buy fur products.

The same warning may apply to the jewelry industry. Rubies gained by poorly-paid workers risking their lives for a pittance in some Asian country, diamonds gained by blood from some strife-ridden African nation – these can be used to turn people against the buying of gems, so it’s important that the store owners ensure their product is legitimate. It is also important for them to turn their customers’ heads away from such unsavory subjects.

The Use of a Jewelry Mannequin

One way this is done is through the look and appearance of their establishment. A clean, well-lit shop staffed by well-mannered people gives an air of respectability. These displays are usually prominent and show off the yellow smile of gold and the glitter of precious gems using jewelry mannequins. These vary from complete mannequins to body parts such as busts or even just hands, all used to mount the related kind of jewelry – necklaces for busts, heads for earrings, circlets, stud mounts and the like, hands and arms for bracelets, braces, bangles, rings, and so on. The display mannequin‘s color and texture are usually tailored to enhance the color and brilliance of the jewelry being displayed. Who doesn’t get a sense of richness seeing a diamond-set gold ring twinkling on dark blue velvet or admire the bright shine of silver against the coolness of a smooth, ivory-white hand? Who wouldn’t want to possess that richness in the token of jewelry?

These mannequins could be female mannequins or male mannequins dressed in appropriate finery with the correct types of jewelry on their person just to give the customer a better idea of how that stone or how that wedding band would look on them or a loved one. In a sense, this is no different than what retail mannequins do for other stores. The customer sees a tableau of adult mannequins frolicking in the sun and suddenly wants to buy beachwear, or a kid sees a child mannequin wearing the latest shoes and wants them, too. They all help sell goods, art and function connected in one object. Today’s technology means the fiberglass mannequin – a far cry from the wax mannequin of yesteryear – has as its only limit the designer’s imagination.

sethson.com » Mannequins

Display Mannequin for Shops and Store Windows

Origins of Visual Merchandising

Kinds of Display Mannequins

Related Posts

Collecting Decorative Mannequins and Dummies

Mannequins for Ornamentation

What is This That I See Before Me?

Related Posts

Male and Female Shop Display Mannequins

Art and Form, Enterprise and Insurgent

Frozen Ideas of Change

Related Posts

Old and New Wire Dress Mannequins

The Change Brought About by Mechanization

The Change of Fortunes

Related Posts

Cynthia and the History of the Female Mannequin

Going Gaga over the Gaba Girls

Subsequent History

Related Posts

Dress Mannequins for Tailors and Dressmakers

What’s a Dress Mannequin?

Future Function of Mannequins

Related Posts

Head Mannequins for Hair Styling and Design

Practice Haircutting Done on Surrogates

Features of Hair Mannequins

Related Posts

Adjustable Mannequins for Stores, Shops and Dressmakers

Roles of Adjustable Mannequins

How Do They Move?

Related Posts

Jewelry Mannequin Arms, Heads and Bodies

Image is Everything

The Use of a Jewelry Mannequin

Related Posts