Male and Female Shop Display Mannequins
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.
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