Mannequins have (almost) always been vaguely human-shaped at best and now they’re more avant-garde and less person-like than ever before.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
Some male mannequins at Bergdorf Goodman have tattoos—another has two left hands, the better to grab shoppers’ attention. Mannequins that arrived at Uniqlo in late March are completely see-through. Intermix’s Madison Avenue flagship last week added figures that strike slouchy, casual poses.
And:
More stores are mixing different types of mannequins, rather than using the same style throughout the store. “You’re increasingly seeing retailers do a combination of abstract and real,” said Ken Nisch, chairman of JGA, a retail design and brand strategy firm based in Southfield, Mich. “Having used sites and software such as Pinterest and Photoshop, the customer’s mind thinks in a multitasking kind of way,” he said. “They have no problem absorbing all these different mediums.”
This means that mannequins are coming with wilder hair and facial features (if they have heads at all). Some are footless or handless while others are specifically designed to display nail art and makeup. Then, of course, there’s the ones with full bush.
Soon, certain Target stores will be jumping on the trend that so far has been embraced primarily by high-end or niche stores by introducing (presumably bush-less) mannequins to see if they “will spur time-strapped shoppers to buy more clothes, perhaps by helping them skip the dressing room.”
Reminder, Target shoppers: The way the clothes look on the mannequin is probably not how they’ll look on you, so please be sure and get a receipt.
Lastly, it turns out that mannequins are also expensive as fuck, with some models retailing for $750 to $900. At such a high cost, these retailers better hope the mannequins come with DOESN’T COME ALIVE AT NIGHT insurance because that shit is terrifying and bad for business.
Image via a German poster for the 1987 Kim Cattrall film Mannequin.