“I got her to keep me from being lonely,” the auction-goer told us as he stood there with his new purchase on the floor at his side. With us being women and a bit curious, he apparently felt he had to explain why he had bought a mannequin, or more exactly, a dress form.
He was joking, but I did find it rather interesting. I’ve gone to auctions long enough and talked to enough buyers, though, to know that they buy what they know will sell – regardless of what it is. He apparently knew that someone would buy this dress form for a lot more than he paid for it.
I had seen the item earlier, and it had caught my eye because lately more of them seemed to be showing up at auction. Mannequins aren’t something that we all must have to complete our décor. So seeing more than a half dozen over the past month struck me as odd.
The auction house has sold mannequin pieces from a wedding dress store, white solid half-body forms, and ones with a head and bodice for displaying jewelry.
This mannequin had the usual metal frame with a lavender cover and knit fabric encircling it. It looked to be in good condition. I didn’t ask how much he paid for it, but I’m sure it wasn’t much.
Outside the auction house, I had seen a tall hollow wicker figure in the curvy shape of a mannequin, and I had watched as an auctioneer sold two male and female metal outlines that weren’t exactly mannequins but they did have the shape of humans.
All these mannequins here, there and everywhere got me to thinking about these non-humans that we shape into our own images – from store-window mannequins and medical-school forms to the half bodies we use to practice mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
What comes to mind first when I think of them is straight from TV: the 1960 Twilight Zone episode called “The After Hours.” That’s the one where a department-store mannequin came to life for 30 days and loved being human so much that she didn’t want to go back to her old lifeless existence. It was both strange and sad.
Our attachment to mannequins apparently goes pretty far back. When King Tut’s tomb was opened in the early 1920s, searchers found a wooden torso that was to be used in the hereafter to hang his garments and jewelry. It was deemed the world’s first dress form.
The surrealist Salvador Dali, an artist who shunned the mundane, seemed to be enthralled with them. He painted a few (“Barcelona Mannequin,” 1926-27), hung with a few and exhibited a few. In the late 1930s, he created a window display for the retailer Bonwit Teller on Fifth Avenue in New York to coincide with an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art on Dadaism.
Dali’s display consisted of a claw-foot tub with mannequin arms reaching out of it holding mirrors. The mirrors reflected a white-faced mannequin draped in chicken feathers with blood-red tears and bug-infested blonde hair stepping into the tub. The display was not greeted with much praise and awe by the public, so the mannequin was taken away. That obviously did not sit well with Dali, who pushed the tub through the store’s window.
I didn’t realize how popular and newsworthy mannequins were until I came across articles about a famous mannequin maker in London who set the fashion world abuzz last year when it introduced anorexic-looking male mannequins. Adel Roostein’s mannequins are said to be more life-like and are modeled after actual human beings whose names we might know, such as Kate Moss and Joan Collins.
