Big breasts for dummies
Mannequins with giant bazooms are busting out in shop windows from coast to coast. More than just garment racks, they are a mirror of current beauty and fashion.
By Wendy Paris
Dress dummies and mannequins have existed in some form since the time of the pharaohs, but it wasn’t until the turn of the last century, with the rise of the “designed” department store window, that they were transformed from shapeless props into realistic figures, and became a fixture of fashion retailing.
I knew a mannequin’s role in life was to help a retailer sell more clothes, and in recent years, help sell a retailer’s brand identity as well. But typically they are supposed to be slim and lithe, aspirational, the plastic version of twiggy fashion models.
Or so I thought. “Mannequins are considered the ideal beauty of our time,” said Marie Davis, editor in chief of FashionWindows.com, an online magazine for fashion and visual merchandising. “But they’re also political. Whatever is happening in the world is also happening in the mannequins. They have to reflect society or people won’t buy the clothes.”
Oh, great. I hate the idea that a surgically achieved, über-chesty look is an ideal for anyone — beyond participants at an exotic dancer convention. After all, the average size of the American female chest is 34B. And while there were about 330,000 breast augmentation surgeries done in the U.S. last year, that’s not a majority of shoppers.
Read more at Salon.com
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