Pygmannequin: A History for Dummies
PART 1: It's Life and Death!

It’s 1936 in New York and the commercial lights that glow warm on the leaves around Madison Square Park have been turned off. There are thirteen and a half million people living in this city, but this apartment is cavernous as a mansion and glamorous as a palace. There’s a party going on, and one lady is the guest of honour, she’s with her tag-along, Mr Gaba. He’s prepared drinks for the both of them, and claims the unusual occupation of ‘Window Display Artist’. But this woman, Cynthia, truly commands the room.

The gathered crowd, glittering in silk and jewels, forms a semicircle around her, they confide and share stories and laugh in an old-timey New York way at her dry remarks that match so well with her carefully careless, languid style. Cynthia seems so at home, but she always has somewhere to be. Something also worth mentioning, is Cynthia not a real woman, she is the creation of the man by her side, in fact she's one of a line-up: a so-called ‘Gaba Girl’.

So I’ve never been a big fan of sculpture. I mean of human shaped or - other shaped things. I’m not sure if the problem I have is how unfamiliar they feel, how they don't seem to represent me, or because of the lack of ways they seem to mean…anything at all. It’s like whenever I walk through some kind of public space, and see a blob of granite with a hole in the middle, sitting on top of another blob, there’s always something in the back of my mind saying "so they really decided to spend money on that?". At some point in my life I found myself speeding towards becoming the kind of art hater you see on every comment thread online. I don’t want to be one of them, and it’s often because I find them hard to argue with, because my response to their snark normally comes to “I don’t know I kinda like the thing”

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“So stop being so close minded, why do you care?”

But then I started noticing some new sculptures, and I didn’t hear anyone complaining about them. In fact the noise was palpably quiet...

Mannequins! Human shaped. Human clothes. Human faces. Catch eyes on the street and layers of dust in charity shops. They’re also the most common thing on earth, it seems like a huge and pointless task to number all the variations and shapes these things can take. In spite of all their novelty, they become part of the background noise, like a foolish bargain necessary to strike before interacting with the outside world. But take a second, next time you pass by. Look through the shop window at a world hidden in plain sight, a world of contradiction, exploitation and unfolding history.

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A Note to the reader:

These days most people with jobs and families, or other life or death occupations simply don't have time to read through four chapters of history about Shop Dummies, I understand this. Skip to parts that interest you, or skip to three quarters of each page to get the gist of the message. But through this thicket of fact, I have done my best to tell a story, so that's why I encourage you to follow from start to finish.

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The earliest Mannequin found was tucked in the antechamber of Tutenkhamun’s tomb(1), but the popular history of mannequins starts a lot later. Mannequin comes from the Dutch word ‘manneken’ which means ‘Little Man’. Most popularly in the 19th century, “Milliner’s Mannequins” were distributed to the wealthy to demonstrate looks and fabrics(2). From the 19th century, partial mannequins were used by tailors mounting fabric, and were found useful for highlighting specific products(3). Over the years, technology permitted the more complete forms we know in shops today. These early forms were hard to handle, expensive, but adaptable and became a handy resource for businesses.​

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From the Victorian period onwards, window shopping was an activity women could do while unaccompanied by their husbands, and mannequins were a way for them to imagine the best version of themselves, in clothes, without wearing them. The customer could identify themselves as something like a mannequin and the mannequin, something like a human.

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People who put Mannequins in shop windows must often cast a wide net. To industry people, a dummy with that familiar smooth, featureless face gets the nickname: “Egghead”.

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In your local Zara, abstract models like this achieve the simple function of having something to hang clothes on, while at the same time preserving a very basic idea of human appearance, and this idea makes them relatable enough to as many people as possible. A few commandments seem to dictate the design of every Mannequin:

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1. Make it cheap to make, transport and handle

2. Make it relatable or aspirational

3. Make it eye catching

4. ...all while avoiding the horrors of the uncanny valley.

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Hitting that ‘golden medium’ between identifiably human, and reassuringly - not, enables shops to mass produce a grab-bag of qualities relevant to their brand. Dummies in JD Sports are stable and athletic and High-end fashion mannequins are tall and thin(4), or seem to posess attitudes all of their own: carefree, aloof, confident. They aren’t exactly human, they might not even appear happy, or grounded in the real world at all, but they are in a club you’d quite like to be in.

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Since the groundbreaking Paris Exposition of 1925, where dummy designs took inspiration from the exaggerated forms of fashion drawings(5), full-size mannequins, with their striking, dynamic appearances, seemed ever-modern and ever-adaptable. French manufacturing titans like Siegel and Stockman used stylisation to create a human you couldn’t identify, successfully drawing attention away from the Mannequin and towards the clothes they hung(6).

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Now in the 21st century, as corporations realise the power of representing niche identities, in race, body type or personality, there have emerged new ways to target customers(7). Through technology, the influence of The Mannequin grows, and the products people attach to it are becoming more and more exotic. As far back as the 1920s the French firms had already established The Mannequin's capacity to blur the real and unreal, and - every so often - the living and the dead.

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It’s 1925, and the corpse of Saint Bernadette has been exhumed for a third time. Despite having expired 46 years ago, the Catholic Church has claimed through the years, that her body had miraculously remained in a state of perfect preservation. This wasn’t true. At the time of her latest outing Bernadette’s body was on its way to full chemical collapse. It was up to the Catholic church to maintain their myth, so they hired master mannequin craftsmen at Pierre Imans to produce a full-body doppelganger. The firm used a special mixture of wax and gelatine(8), recreated her hands and face from casts, and smoothed out her offensive elements to render her fit for public display, where it remains to this day.

If someone looks at that strangely serene face, even under its layer of wax, and feels moved to holiness, then the miracle has a purpose.(9)

Thomas L. McDonald

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Extra info

By 2016 in New York, Patrick Alford Jr. had been missing for six years. A New York Ad agency brought attention to his case by hiring sculptor Paul Evert to make a duplicate of him as a mannequin, which stood in the window of upmarket clothing store Soho boutique. His unique individual facial features contrasting with the generic egghead models around him.

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By putting a face on a store mannequin, it’s one more way we can make sure someone missing is not invisible.

NYPD Lt. Christopher Zimmerman, commanding officer of the Missing Persons Squad

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Several times I tried to set a mannequin on fire. The first two tries fizzled out, but another attempt, on a finger-numbing November evening three years ago, was a success. For thirty seconds, in my friend’s back garden, you’d have had to squint your eyes to see the figure of a woman in flames. I carried her under my arm back to my house. One of her feet was melted and crushed from when she collapsed under the heat and her top-heavy body. Alcohol and bandages I wrapped around her had left scorch marks across her arms and legs. I felt extremely... relieved to have the final shot of the short film I bought her for.

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I finally had all I needed. But at the same time, the idea of just throwing her away made me feel guilty. So, I ended up keeping her standing, at 5 foot 7 inches, in the corner of my room for about a year, which one time gave my  housemate the fright of her life. My charred mannequin had a hole at the top of her head where the plastic was poured into an industrial mould, and because her shoulder joint was loose, she was often also missing an arm, but in the long year of isolation over COVID, having her in the corner made life a bit more interesting. That year especially - when so many projects were dreamt up and eventually came to nothing, she became a physical reminder that I could actually finish something; she was a record of an idea that had left my head and entered the real world. I have no idea where she is now, but I have my film.​

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Preview of Pygmannequin: PART 2:

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Head on to Part 2

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References