Old and New Wire Dress Mannequins

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.

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