They’re shape-shifters!
Retail is not . . . embracing a lot of the people who are spending money on clothes — [it’s] ignoring them.” — Mannequin manufacturer Ralph Pucci
mannequins, featuring stretch marks, freckles and even the skin condition vitiligo, which causes patches of skin to lose their pigmentation. Lord & Taylor and Saks Fifth Avenue have a rainbow of Afroand natural-hair-sporting mannequins — designed by Pucci and the artist Rebecca Moses — in its high-end designer shops. And by the spring, Nordstrom is planning a full-scale overhaul of its mannequins in at least 30 of its locations, mixing robust size 12 and 16 models with the more “standard” 2s and 4s, as well as 8s — no more exiling plussizes to department store Siberia.
Nordstrom tells The Post that such changes are due to customer demand. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the average American woman’s measurements put her at about a size 14. Meanwhile, according to a 2012 study by the Houstonbased market research firm Plunkett, 67 percent of women in the US are considered plus-size.
“I think that [brick-andmortar] retail is not doing that well [financially] because it’s not embracing a lot of the people who are spending money on clothes — [it’s] ignoring them,” says Pucci, whose eponymous company sculpts its mannequins by hand in a Flatiron District workshop. “But I think they’re beginning to embrace diversity of all kinds.”
Mannequins didn’t always look like the minimalist wraiths we think of today. When department stores first opened in the late 19th century, the forms that donned the clothes for sale had curvaceous figures — with enormous busts and corseted waists — as was the style at the time. But by the 1920s and ’30s, which brought about a more sylphlike ideal, mannequins had gotten smaller. By the time Pucci entered his parents’ New Jersey mannequin-repair business in the 1960s — and decided to branch out into creating his own models — British manufacturers were pumping out waifish offerings based on Swinging Sixties It girl Twiggy, complete with painted faces and polished fingernails.
“I decided we can’t compete with them because they’re too good,” says Pucci. “So we went the total opposite direction.”
In the 1970s, Pucci launched a range of abstract athletic mannequins — painted bold colors such as bright red or forest green. The company followed that up with a muscular collection based on Greek and Roman sculpture, just in time for the aerobics craze. And as broadshouldered “Dynasty” fashion boomed, and larger-than-life supermodels roamed the catwalks, mannequins got even bigger and more glamorous. Stores commissioned bright-haired, exuberantly painted and diverse mannequins for even their junior-clothing displays.
“Everyone was looking to be different back then,” says Pucci.
The 1990s changed all that. Stores demanded standardized, minimalist mannequins painted glossy white or black.
Lisa Maurer, senior vice president of the French mannequin company Siegel & Stockman, which has been around since the late 1800s, says that manufacturers continued offering more diverse and larger-sized mannequins, but that stores weren’t buying them.
“We can make lots of different products,” she says. “But the market dictates what goes out.”
Yet, Maurer has noticed in the past few years that retailers have expressed an interest in changing the shapes of their mannequins — and requested a shift away from the burly plus-size molds of yore. Sometimes that means paying more attention to details, such as making slightly larger heads and hands to balance out the proportions of a plus-size model, instead of just transferring those parts from a size 2 mannequin onto a size 16 one. Sometimes that means adding ab definition — more Amazonian than babushka — or some womanly curves, including what Maurer calls “a bit of booty.”
“You have the Kardashians posing for Calvin Klein, and we have a mannequin who looks like Kim, with what looks like a corseted waist, a healthy hip, a feminine shape,” she adds. Mannequins also vary globally, depending on a culture’s beauty standards. The Venezuelan factory Eliezer Álvarez, for example, has taken to producing mannequins with bulbous boobs, perky butts and impossibly long legs, to reflect its cosmetically enhanced clients.
Fortunately, says Maurer, with 3-D printing and scanning, it’s easier and cheaper than ever to create more shapes and variations on the standard mannequin — no live models required.
For many shoppers who once felt alienated by the skinny waifs in the store windows, it’s a welcome change.
“The first thing you see when you go to a store is the mannequin,” says Waldman. “Seeing a mannequin who looks like you means that these clothes aren’t just for skinny women. It’s all part of a move in the industry toward inclusion.”