Boxing Mannequin

Mannequins have been around for thousands of years, but their use in store display is more recent. Kings and Queens who are concerned about their appearance, like the pharaohs, would form a dress made of their body dimensions. The court dress maker or tailor would use the "dress form 'to display and make clothing to avoid embarrassment during a royal connection.

The evolution of this ancient form of dress crude through the Middle Ages until just before the Industrial Revolution is unknown because there are so few written records and no museum examples to study. Wickerwork mannequins were certainly around in the late 1700s and were probably filled with stuffing and leather. Wire-framed versions was born in 1835, but the models were not yet in use for display in store. The invention of plate glass, the filament lamp and the sewing machine were the catalysts that put mannequins in the store.

In the window glass in 1880 began to be installed in retail establishments and street lights began to appear. The improvement of sewing machines enabled ready to wear clothes in large quantities to. The industrial revolution also created a new middle class with money to spend on what was previously available only to royalty and landed gentry clothes - fashionable! More retail stores open and store owners need models to display the latest fashion.

These models were made at the beginning of the wax, wood or heavy fabric and because they needed to stand legs are made of iron. To give them a form of papier-macched and sawdust were used. Consequently, the result has been costly, difficult to maintain and very heavy object. Yet such was the interest in fashion that by the end of the century the mannequin was already the center of a fledgling industry called cutting window "which later became known as" visual merchandising.

The advent of large department store with big show windows, behind which mannequins bearing the latest trends could be seen by the crowds, encouraged window size as well as artistic practice. Mannequins slowly expanded from being just a simple accessory to display the goods to a more realistic form. Mannequins with glass eyes, real hair and facial expressions began to appear.

The First World War sent millions of European men fight and women left home to work among men. This change has caused a revolution in women's clothing, they shed their bustiers and crinolines and adopted a more fluid line of clothing. Mannequins gradually became more flexible and realistic to reflect these changes, but could they be confused with reality. Not until the 1930s and Lester Gaba does realism become ubiquitous.

Lester Gaba is a soap sculptor in New York and was invited by a department store dummies he could produce a more stable material with the same detail and quality that could be achieved with soap. He created six astonishing specimens of plaster that are known as "Gaba girls. They were both given names and part of a prestigious hotel where they were dressed in fine clothes and jewels, of New York high society loved them! Socialites also loved Lester Gaba, who had the habit of going around with a dummy eccentric named Cynthia. Cynthia, his elbows on his knees with a cigarette in hand, traveled by taxi and appeared with Lester Gaba in a box at the opera, the Stork Club and many other famous places. The publicity was enormous and the stores could not get enough of the Gaba Girls or their imitators.

Depression and the Second World War caused shortages and shop windows became rather somber with the mannequins in the day looking a bit melancholy.