Display Mannequin for Shops and Store Windows
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.
Posted in Mannequins