Perfect Plastic Salespeople

W ith the serenity born of good breeding and ample money, the lovely ladies in the expensive furs stand in the department store window, gazing pensively into the middle distance. Across the road in the speciality shop, there is a group of party girls. Wearing red hair, green eye shadow and jaunty expressions, they appear to be having a marvelous time in their little black $19.95 dresses. Next door, at the sportswear shop, the girls have long blonde hair, blue eyes and a thoughtful expression; they obviously attend good colleges and receive large clothing allowances. The college girls back at the department store are much livelier, but in a wholesome way, of course. They're all mannequins set up to sell clothes in the softest way possible. They make their pitch subliminally; the shopper who glances into the window immediately puts herself into the clothes, never realizing she's influenced by the glamorous creatures who wear them.

B ut the stores that use these mannequins know what they're doing. They use different mannequins to attract a different clientele. The department store wouldn't have one of those go-go girls on the premises, but for the speciality shop appealing to the young girl with a job, they are just right. The young girl dreams of parties and dates, and the jaunty mannequins promise her a good time (in a little black $19.95 dress). The department store, on the other hand, sells Paris clothes and wants to project an image of high fashion and impeccable taste. The big store's college girls are well groomed; its children look as if they are carefully brought up and have lovely manners. Small-town stores, with a different clientele, use pug-nosed, healthy-looking mannequins, and avoid the hollow-cheeked beauties of the fashionable world.

T he giant department stores even aspire to their own distinctive styles in mannequins. Eaton's of Toronto has a rather elfin group of child mannequins modeled from artist's drawings; they have a slightly dream-like quality. Simpson's has a more realistic group of wistful, delicate children with button noses and big dark eyes. And their cousins can be seen across town decked out in red wigs to give them a different look.

M annequins are worth every dime of the thousands of dollars the department stores spend on them each year, or the $100 the small-town merchant occasionally puts out. For Mannequins do sell clothes. Women seldom pay much conscious attention to mannequins' faces, yet display people find that a dress worn by an attractive mannequin will outsell the same dress on a dowdy mannequin that has seen better days. A bolt of yard goods can lie on the same counter for months; make up a dress of it, put it on a mannequin, and the cloth can sell out in practically no time.

B ut it doesn't all happen automatically. To do their selling job, mannequins change their hair to suit the occasion; flat for hats, high for evening, and artfully tousled for lingerie. To sell sportswear they swing golf clubs, or don skis; for beachwear, they acquire toes and toenails, and for bikinis, they show their navels.

W e think of our mannequins as performers on the stage of fashion,' says Jack Prior of Simpson's, romantically. And big stores like Simpson's, with plenty of money to spend on display, can assemble quite a cast of characters. Fifteen to twenty years ago, female mannequins used to be dull, aloof creatures who looked as if butter wouldn't melt in their mouths. But in recent years they have acquired livelier personalities. They are modeled on real people, sometimes celebrities. A few years ago many mannequins looked like Audrey Hepburn and Jacqueline Kennedy.
More recently they have resembled Jean Shrimpton, the gazelle-like English girl who is the top New York photographer's model just now. Mannequins with the lion's mane hairdo affected by New York socialite Baby Jane Holzer can be seen in several Canadian stores this year, wearing young elegant clothes. Baby Jane Holzer is young, rich, digs Beatles, pop and op art, and was dubbed girl-of-the-year by the New York Herald Tribune columnist, Tom Wolfe. Display men sometimes have mannequins copies from Vogue photographs right down to the last curl. But it is generally unrewarding to stand puzzling over the identity of a striking mannequin. It might be an old Katharine Hepburn model with a new blonde wig. Or it might turn out to be Carol Bjorkman, in real life a reporter for Women's Wear Daily. Miss Bjorkman posed for one line of high fashion mannequins now popular in Canada, but not many outside the fashion business recognize her.

B y assembling its stock of plastic personalities in varying combinations, the store can create their vignettes behind closed curtains, because mannequins seen in their off moments, can be unsettling. It is somehow embarrassing to see a mannequin standing naked in a store window, especially if someone has been so cruel as to remove her wig. It is curious, to say the least, to see a one-armed mannequin wearing a Chinese silk dressing gown, with her other arm lying neatly at her feet. And the mannequins in charity thrift shops look as if they have seen better days; they stand in the window, listing slightly, as tired as the clothes they model. Their finish is chipped, but there is still a little wear in them, as there is in their dresses.

B ut the big department stores go out of their way to maintain the illusion the mannequins create. It is a 'violation', one executive told me, to trundle a mannequin through his store without a cover on; the customers' sense of decency might be outraged. Apparently customers do worry about these things. In Birmingham, England, a few years ago, someone complained to a store about the young women standing in its window in nighties and frilly undies, and them not even married. 'Are all your models wealthy spinsters of ladies of easy virtue?' he asked. The store responded by quickly slipping gold wedding rings on 30 or its models, giving engagement rings to the ones in personal but less compromising situations, and phoning the local paper. 'Call it a gesture to Birmingham's propriety and moral welfare,' said the display manager.

T o the trade, on the other hand, mannequins are often displayed - and advertised - without anything on. In the Toronto showroom of the display firm Morgese-Soriano, 30 or 40 naked ladies stand in attractive poses, each lighted in her own niche, creating a fleeting impression that the visitor has wandered into an Oriental seraglio.

M annequins have a capacity to arouse fantasy in people on the other side of the plate glass, and they have inspired some pretty creepy fiction, all of it written by men. Philip Wylie, for instance, wrote a novel in which he suggested mannequins would make better wives than some women. And in John Collier's story, "Special Delivery", a shop assistant named Albert falls in love with the mannequin he has to dress each day. The other assistants tease him so much that he finally runs away with her and comes, alas, to a very bad end.

B ut a person really would have to be bonkers to have such vivid fantasies about a mannequin he knew well. I couldn't find a Canadian display man would admit to calling any of his mannequins by pet names; in general, display people treat their mannequins with detachment. It is hard, after all, to feel close to someone when you have to cover her head with cellophane and take her arms off before you can start dressing her; when you have to handle her with tissue paper so you won't scratch her finish; when you have to turn her upside down to get her stockings on, and jam her rigid feet into shoes. A New York display man once kissed a mannequin just to see what it was like. 'It was like kissing a desk,' he reported.

H owever the display person's work is more fun than it was in the Twenties, when department store mannequins were made of plaster of Paris and weighed 90 pounds or more, or were carved wood slabs that barely resembled the female form and made all clothes look like sacks. During the thirties , papier-mâché became the favourite material for mannequins; their weight came down to 30 or 40 pounds and the relatively new mannequin industry expanded. In New York, a sculptor named Lester Gaba created a plaster mannequin called Cynthia, which was so lifelike that he sometimes took it to the Metropolitan Opera and El Morocco. Cynthia was a hearty 120 pounds, though, while today's elegant creatures weigh as little as 13 pounds. The weight loss can be traced to their construction of glass fibers and polyester resins - a petrochemical derived from oil.

A fter Cynthia, lifelike mannequins became the vogue. Today the most natural ones in North America come from the New York studios of Mary Brosnan, who sells to many top department stores, including some of the most fashion-conscious ones in Canada. She keeps three sculptors busy all year round producing new designs in clay. Her studio makes moulds from the clay, and casts fiberglas mannequins from the moulds. Their heads are then fitted with wigs, and their faces carefully painted by artists.

M iss Brosnan finds regional variations in the mannequin trade. New York likes them well-bred, Miami wants them glamorous, and California demands healthy tans. Toronto and Montreal like drama in their mannequins, Miss Brosnan says. they want them elegant and ladylike but a little unusual, and will accept extreme hairdos, like the lion's mane.

T he largest Canadian manufacturer now is Morgese-Soriano, a firm that buys American and European models to copy in their Toronto plant. they sell to small stores and to department stores outside Toronto and Montreal. It's an unpredictable business, with uneven sales; in their best year, 1961, they shipped out 3,900 plastic beauties to Canadian stores, but this year they don't expect to sell more than 2,800.

T here has never been a mannequin census, but there are probably tens of thousands at work. Even a small store may have two or three, while a big department store might own as many as 600, most with 34-23-34 dimensions, and capable of wearing either a size 10 or 12.

M orgese-Soriano finds that department stores generally prefer a mature, dignified model. But this firm also deals in the party girls with their snub noses and gay poses. These are European types, made here from French and Italian models, and aimed at the young, sportswear trade. They have fuller busts and rounder hips than the mature models, but their waists are a tine 19 inches, and they are definitely sexy. It is not that Europeans are shaped differently from North American women; just that European mannequins traditionally look less like ladies and more like show girls than ours do.

T he shape of mannequins changes to follow fashion trends. In the Thirties, they were pigeon-toed, because that was considered stylish. In the Forties, when the broad-shouldered look prevailed, they had deltoids like prizefighters. In the last 10 years they have taken off a bit of weight around the middle, as fashion's ideal woman has slimmed down. the sudden advent of the sack dress caused panic in some quarters; a New England mannequin maker was kept busy altering mannequins to raise their busts three inches. Six months later the sack dress went out and the mannequins had to be sent back again to be restored to their original shape.

K eeping mannequins in repair and looking stylish is a small industry in itself. Mannequins will last for years with care, although hair styles tend to change every six months or so. Canada's leading mannequin renovator is Dorothy Harpley, of Toronto, who has a studio behind her house jammed with mannequins and pieces of mannequins in various stages of completion. They come to her from most of the large eastern stores, and she does them elegant piled-up hair styles for evening, or plain styles for day clothes. This fall she and her five employees were busy giving little-boy hairstyles with side curls to dozens of mannequins. A new hair style usually means a completely new wig. Miss Harpley makes them out of buckram shaped to the model's head, and then glues on rayon hair. The finished wig cost $23 and looks glamorous, but it feels like steel wool.

R efinishers like Miss Harpley buy used mannequins, renovate them, and sell them to smaller stores for from $40 to $100. (The best mannequins originally sell for $265, with cheaper models starting at $99.) The life span of a mannequin can be as long as 25 years, according to New York refinisher Barney Robbins, who still offers for sale the broad-shouldered beauties of yesteryear. In fact, says Miss Harpley, there is more demand for old, beat up mannequins than for good used ones. CBC television uses them as props; high school students dress them up for prom decorations. And some people, she says cheerfully, like to cut them up. 'We sold one to an artist the other day - I guess he wanted one to butcher a bit.'

B ut rather than sell an old mannequin for $10, Miss Harpley prefers to salvage the fittings to use in renovating other mannequins. Old mannequins, it turns out, don't really die; they just get rearranged. '

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