Like garments, academic articles are largely produced “backstage” and the labour that goes into them is equally unseen. I am thrilled to finally share this essay free of charge to readers and to let it go, but it is important to me to acknowledge the hands, hearts, and minds that have been involved in its extended genesis and début on the public stage. I feel it is important to place “Body Doubles” in the context of the histories of my evolution as a scholar, the field of Fashion Studies, and of the launch of the inaugural issue of our journal.

       “Body Doubles” was originally a chapter of my doctoral dissertation, which I completed in 2002. I would not write the same article today, nor would I now have the time to do quite the amount of archival and actual sleuthing it required. However, I have continually updated it to reflect the expanding literature in our field, and I do feel it draws on the unique richness of approaches and frameworks at our disposal as scholars of fashion. The research process involved everything from systematic digital searches for the word mannequin in French literary sources (in the relative infancy of such technologies), close readings of obscure images I unearthed in the Cabinet des Estampes at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris that form part of my art historical training, as well as talking to an eighty-year-old tailor in Paris and kinetically experiencing the actual studio environments and techniques of making clothing in the setting of a French fashion school. In terms of theoretical frameworks, I began with a Marxist-feminist approach and have attempted to incorporate, so to speak, some of the possibilities offered by Actor-Network Theory (ANT), if only in a preliminary manner. A peer-reviewer asked me early on whether the mannequin was an object or an idea. I can now say with conviction that it is both, and more.

       In reflecting on the process of working on the mannequin, an object that literally embodies dehumanization, I concluded that my labour on it, if often angst-ridden, has been anything but alienating. In fact, working on the mannequin’s inanimate form has allowed me meet and establish strong intellectual and emotional ties to so many people and places that I’ve become more sentimentally attached to this article than any other. I am reluctant to let go of this “actor” in my life. As a student, this work helped me grasp the mechanics of tailoring and pattern drafting when I took a summer course at the Parisian École supérieure des arts et techniques de la mode (ESMOD), the school founded in 1841 by tailor Alexis Lavigne. For my research, I was determined to access Lavigne’s papers in ESMOD’s archives, but in order to do so I had to formally enroll as a fashion student and learn his techniques, which have been passed down for over a century. It was a humbling but illuminating experience.

       When it left the workshop, this research helped me get my first job. Professor Christopher Breward encouraged me to present “Body Doubles” at a conference at the London College of Fashion. I wish to express my gratitude to him — his book on the Hidden Consumer was a lifeline during my doctoral work. At that conference I met Professor Caroline Evans, a fellow mannequin scholar, who became a true friend and mentor. This article is dedicated to her. I also made Barbara Burman’s acquaintance, and she was instrumental in setting me on the track towards my first paid position at the Winchester School of Art in 2002. Barbara, along with Lesley Miller and Judith Attfield, were ideal mentors who revealed the manifold possibilities of the History of Dress and Textiles to me. I also want to thank Professor Valerie Steele, whose work has legitimated the field and who famously launched the journal Fashion Theory in 1997, just as I was writing my dissertation proposal. My thesis advisor Professor Michael Marrinan gave me essential critical feedback, and Audrey Colphon, our fashion technician at Toronto Metropolitan University School of Fashion, patiently helped explain the utility of mannequins for draping in the studio. I also want to thank the graduate students in Toronto Metropolitan University’s MA Fashion program, as well as the wonderful anonymous peer-reviewers (and many friends) who gave me such helpful suggestions for improving it over the years. I’ve done my best.

       The mannequin helped me on my journey from being a lonely graduate student in Art History with a love for dress and material culture to an interdisciplinary scholar able to collaborate and co-edit a new journal in the field with my friend and fellow idealist Dr. Ben Barry and an incredible international editorial board. I have learned so much from my pioneering mentors in the field of Fashion Studies and the generosity of my community of scholars, creative practitioners, and students. Thank you all.

Parisian dolls enchanted Walter Benjamin, who called them the “true fairies” of the arcades.[1] In the nineteenth century, the artisans and entrepreneurs of Paris garnered a worldwide reputation for their skill in producing an astonishing, beguiling, and sometimes disturbing range of humanoid figures. Some of these bodies became children’s playthings, but professional artists had their own life-sized, often jointed “dolls.” Painters posed and dressed these pliable and pliant tools called mannequins in service of their art. Tailors and then dressmakers, who also required docile bodies, quickly adopted these useful mannequins. While the English language has specific terms to differentiate between these diverse figures, the French word mannequin designates artists’, tailors’, and dressmakers’ dummies as well as the live, professional fashion model. Miniature, articulated wooden people called lay-figures in English still help artists draw and paint as fashion students and designers drape and construct garments on “tailor’s dummies” or “dress forms” behind the closed doors of their studios, while their more visible brothers and sisters animate every boutique and department store in the cast-resin guise of the shop window dummy.[2] Finally, the word mannequin was and is still used to designate the live fashion model, that idealized and often emaciated figure who struts across the catwalk and scrolls down the screens of social media feeds.

Yet despite the starring role mannequins continue to play in the making and selling of clothing, their history in the fashion industry is less than two hundred years old. This article attempts to trace the origins of the fashion mannequin and to challenge the gender assumptions it has been cloaked in. The mannequin was a key technology in the construction of normative bodies, a principal “actor” in shaping current clothing cultures, and literally embodied contests over creativity and commodification in nineteenth-century Paris.

      In 1900, Léon Riotor published the first book on the history of the mannequin. His retrospective account completely effaced the history of the tailor’s dummy in favour of the more alluring and erotic charge of the female mannequin: “The history of the mannequin? It is the history of woman herself, not of natural woman, but of the one born of our mannered and perverse tastes, the one whose contours are determined by fashion.”[3] The female mannequin has dominated historical scholarship in the field.[4] Her uncanny presence in twentieth-century shop window displays and Surrealist art has reinforced scholarly tendencies to psychoanalyze the female mannequin and focus on her commodified, eroticized body.[5] Drawing on frameworks informed by Marxist commodity fetishism, gender studies, and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (ANT), this article nuances our interpretations of material culture, demonstrating that male mannequins are key to our understanding of how fashion envisioned and reified normative bodies. In fact, contrary to established fashion history narratives, I argue that male mannequins appeared before their female counterparts. As early as the 1820s and even more commonly during the July Monarchy (1830–48), the somewhat derogatory term mannequin was given to the stylish men hired by tailors to advertise their wares.[6] This dandy-for-hire in the flesh was joined by inanimate tailors’ forms and stiff, painted shop window dummies. As both artifacts and live actors, these novel tailors’ mannequins enforced sartorial ideals of hegemonic masculinity and helped to produce revolutions in tailoring. They quickly populated spaces of fashion production and consumption and artists, writers, and critics caricatured their performances of the fashionably dressed bourgeois body. The mass feminization and production of female mannequins celebrated and reviled by Riotor did not occur until the second half of the nineteenth century, when France exported dress forms and seductive shop window dummies across the globe in millions of almost identical copies. The mannequin’s radical sex change from the Romantic period to the fin-de-siècle is as remarkable as it is complex. Her proliferation occurred at a time when Paris vociferously proclaimed the Parisienne’s superiority. These stereotypes of the feminized body of Parisian fashion dating from the fin-de-siècle continue to echo in popular and scholarly tropes of the mannequin today.[7] In part, they are related to changes in the garment industry and retail sectors, but exemplify Andreas Huyssen’s theoretical model, which proposes a general feminization of the commodity in mass culture during the second half of the nineteenth century.[8] It is therefore time to shift our focus to the earlier male mannequin as an equally troubling and complex site for the less visible production and consumption of masculinities.[9]

Before embarking on a study of the nineteenth century, a short prehistory places the mannequin in context. The first and only known fashion “dolls” were female, and their role in Early Modern fashion production and dissemination still requires elucidation.[10] Art historians have managed to paint a clearer picture of androgynous or masculine mannequins as artists’ “silent partners.”[11] By the early fifteenth century, mannequins are documented as “common tools” in artistic practice.[12] The word mannequin comes from the Middle Dutch, mannekijn or “little man.”[13] These small-scale, three-dimensional, abstract, and often articulated representations of male or androgynous human bodies were ideal clotheshorses for draping and rendering fabric.[14] Like fashion dolls, the origins of these body doubles are difficult to document.

By 1694, the word had entered the dictionary of the Académie française and by the eve of the French Revolution, life-sized, articulated mannequins were fairly widespread.[16] Few of these objects still exist, but a small-scale mannequin hand-crafted in the 1740s by the French sculptor Roubiliac and accompanied by an elite male and working-class female wardrobe (ca. 1750–62) survives in the collections of the Museum of London.[17] The high quality of its construction and dress are evident in details like the wig crafted of human hair and the fingers, which are poseable and individually articulated [1].

By the mid-eighteenth century, the French had become the most prominent makers of luxury, life-sized, articulated padded mannequins perfectionnés, complete with silk cloth “flesh” coverings and realistic painted papier-mâché faces.[18] These three-dimensional, poseable bodies could replace costly live models or wealthy sitters, obviating the need for clients to come in for lengthy posing sessions. Artists continued to use full-scale mannequins, but the nineteenth century saw this object’s relocation from the painter’s studio to the tailor’s workshop.

As with the lay-figure, the exact origins of the mannequin as tailor’s dummy are difficult to trace, but tailors seem to have used it to both make and sell clothing starting in the late 1820s. While the exact moment and means of this transition from artist’s to tailor’s atelier is not clear, the elite worlds of art, literature, and fashion constantly overlapped in early nineteenth-century Paris.[19] Artists like Horace Vernet and Paul Gavarni drew fashion plates, while the best tailors, including Staub and Kleber, were considered “sculptors.” The word “chic,” which sounds like the scrawl of an artist’s pencil or the slice of a tailor’s shears, originated in the early nineteenth century as artists’ slang for an artificial but superficially elegant way of drawing and was soon applied to those who sported a dashing, tailored “look.”[20] The marketing of fashion and art had much in common. As Robyn Roslak argues, many Parisian artists “produced their canvases for sale in the open marketplace,” were paid by the piece, and “supplied the few with luxury.”[21] The nineteenth century saw the same shift from bespoke tailoring for the wealthy few towards suits made in advance for the open market, transforming many men’s subjective and embodied experiences of dress and dressing.

      Extravagantly decorated, colourful elite men’s dress in the Ancien Régime transitioned into the severe, black bourgeois suit of the later nineteenth century. The emphasis of nineteenth-century tailors was on perfect cut and fit: they literally sculpted their clients’ bodies with woollen broadcloth, steaming the fabric and shaping it with buckram linings to mould it perfectly to the male form. In order to create what Anne Hollander calls these “heroes in wool,”[22] the human body had to be measured with meticulous precision. In previous centuries, exact measurement had been reserved for expensive cloth; tailors simply cut notches in pieces of paper to mark the bodily dimensions of each individual client. The final garment was then adjusted on the client’s body during several fitting sessions.

      After the French Revolution, the newly invented metric system or mètre révolutionnaire attempted to replace the bodycentric, highly regionalized, and aristocratic Ancien Régime system that included measurements like pouces or thumbs (inches in the Imperial system), used the “pied du Roi” or “King’s foot’ as a standard, and allowed local nobles to set their own measures for tithes of taxable goods. Postrevolutionary scientists attempted to make measurement a more rational, universal, and “democratic” process with the decimal system.[24] In his comprehensive article on standardizing nineteenth-century French bodies and clothing in “industrial sizes,” Manuel Charpy describes how quickly this mathematical turn influenced tailoring systems and practices.[25] During the first half of the nineteenth century, master tailors vied with each other in their patenting of measuring apparatuses and their publication of new geometric cutting methods. They produced instruments like Beck’s costumomètre (1819), Sylvestre’s corsage mécanique (1829), and Delas’ somatomètre or body-metre (1839).[26] Mathematical abstraction became the norm in clothing construction, as flat pattern drafting and “geometrical” tailoring techniques began to take over from embodied, intimate interactions and traditional methods of draping cloth directly on the body of the client.

      It was difficult to transfer complex garments made from two-dimensional patterns onto three-dimensional bodies without making errors. As suit jackets became increasingly complex in cut and construction in the early nineteenth century, the mannequin became an essential working tool.

The fashion mannequin reversed this dynamic, allowing the tailor to take a flat, two-dimensional pattern and bring it to life on the three-dimensional body of the mannequin. These opposing creative processes meant that most manufacturers of artist’s lay figures begin to advertise separately from those who sold mannequins to tailors and dressmakers.[27] Yet the 1900 directory of Parisian commerce lists several manufacturers, including Stockman and Merle, who continued to market and sell to both the garment industry and artists.[28]

      Like the lay-figure before it, in theory the tailor’s dummy dispensed with the need for busy bourgeois clients to “sit” for lengthy fittings. However, even in the nineteenth century, high-end tailors who made suits for the elite did not rely as heavily on standardized tailor’s dummies. Wealthy clients who did not want to come in repeatedly could have individualized, bespoke mannequins sculpted to their precise measurements. By contrast, the harried working-class customer of the nineteenth century wanted his clothing immediately. While readymade clothing had long existed for the working classes, a new breed of entrepreneur in the first half of the nineteenth century responded to consumer demand for the rapid production of more fitted, elegant suits. On the lower end of the scale, block figures proved invaluable for the confectionneur, or ready-made clothing entrepreneur. These men took the scaled, geometric patterns so lovingly invented by the bespoke tailor and turned them into garments in standardized sizes for the mass market. According to Charpy, however, the popularity of clothing in fixed sizes encountered “multiple cultural resistance[s]” because “they were established for ‘dominated’ people and colonial subjects who usually were part of administrations: children, prisoners, boarders, or soldiers.”[29]

      Tailor’s dummies were rarely illustrated because they were functional tools used in the relative secrecy of the tailor’s workshop. The earliest depiction I have found of a mannequin in use suggests that it was linked to the production of ready-made clothing. Based on the cut of the suits in the image, the anonymous pen and ink drawing dates to circa 1826–9 and shows two tailors absorbed in their work [2].

FIGURE 2

A tailor’s dummy in the workshop, ca. 1826–9. Pen and ink. Paris: Cabinet des Estampes, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Bolts of cloth line the walls of a room illuminated by one large window on the left. The standing tailor on the right cuts out cloth from one of these bolts, while his companion, whose knees are mostly concealed under the still sleeveless jacket draped over them, plies his needle, pad-stitching lapels. This tailor sits on his workbench, hunched over in a traditional cross-legged position still called en tailleur in French. Both tailors are stylishly dressed and coiffed, as one would expect of fashion professionals. A dummy dressed in a form-fitting jacket presides somewhat imperiously over their work. The headless but seemingly embodied garment occupies the centre of the image, where it “stands” with its back to us. Presumably it is being used as a three-dimensional visual template for the tailors or to check the fit and hang of the finished garment. There is a row of completed frock and cutaway coats strangely floating on the right with numbers pinned to them, suggesting several possibilities. Perhaps these are garments made in standardized sizes for anonymous customers, rather than pieces that were bespoke or “spoken for” by individual clients, or they could be order numbers for individual clients, who may have designated numerically rather than by name, providing us with an idea of the scale of the operation.

      This visual evidence of the tailor’s dummy in use dates to the late 1820s. Written evidence appears in the trade literature with relative frequency during the period of the July Monarchy (1830–48). In 1839, the Journal des Marchands-Tailleurs announced the advent of “another” tailor’s dummy:

Another mechanical-mannequin of new invention has appeared in Paris. It is, they say, extremely useful for tailors, because they can try all sorts of garments on this apparatus… [and] are able to assure themselves in advance whether or not they will have to retouch each item…[30]

      While at first glance this piece seems to be a promotional blurb, professional journals like this one provide ambivalent accounts of the actual usefulness of the stiff, abstracted, “mechanical” body of the tailor’s dummy, which could not adequately reproduce the constantly mobile and yielding flesh and varying postures of the “real” body of the client. Regardless of its shortcomings, by mid-century it had joined shears, paper patterns, and the tape measure as an essential tool in the workshop of the tailor and the clothing entrepreneur.

As the 1820s dummy “supervising” workers and the “spring mounted” apparatus of the 1830s suggest, the mannequin was not merely an inert thing — it wielded a power of its own over human actors. In actor-network theory (ANT), which aims to dissolve the boundaries between human and non-human “actors,” mannequins become part of an “assemblage” in the tailor’s workroom and “actively construct and perform the world they apparently describe.”[31] ANT, which originally used an ethnographic methodology to analyze how forms of knowledge were constructed by the tools and scientists in a laboratory setting, could equally apply to the relationships produced by and through the tailor’s workshop, tools, mannequins, and customers. Though it is not often applied to fashion history, ANT shows potential in exploring exactly how often overlooked objects like mannequins worked as a technology in the garment industry. In Jane Bennett’s words, an actor “is that which does something, has sufficient coherence to perform actions, produce effects, and alter situations.” The mannequin changed the way cloth and humans interacted with the body through a normative and standardized intermediary, altering or sometimes even replacing the fleshly and personalized interaction between tailor or dressmaker and individual client. As the 1820s drawing implies, the mannequin’s body now humorously seems to be “directing operations,” producing two glaring absences in the assemblages typical of earlier tailoring practice.

It enabled the mass-production of garments, which has bequeathed us an often-bitter legacy of alienated labour, unhappy consumers, and ill-fitting and environmentally deleterious fast fashion.

The tailor’s “block” or dummy and its brother produced for retail display arose in parallel during the first decades of the nineteenth century. A men’s fashion journal appropriately named Le Narcisse advertised torsos with lifelike heads in 1831: “Men’s busts for the use of tailors, executed using a new process… These busts, whose precision and elegance is combined with their usefulness for trying on garments, add to the decoration of the most elegant salons or boutiques.”[33] While these busts are sold interchangeably for either “trying on garments” or “decorating” boutiques, the marketing material focuses on their suitability as display mannequins: for six extra francs, the maker could add an enameled head and eyes, conjuring a lifelikeness that would be an unnecessary extravagance in a simple, headless tailor’s block.

      Unlike the artist’s mannequin or tailor’s dummy, which was concealed in his atelier, shop window mannequins like the ones in Le Narcisse advertised men’s clothing in increasingly lavish spectacles of retail display. Urban space was redefined during the 1830s and 1840s as a space for leisurely visual enjoyment and consumption.[34]

In his Physiologie du tailleur (1841), the dandy Roger de Beauvoir observed scornfully that in order to pay their high rents “Almost all the tailors in the passages display a dressed mannequin at the door” and sell “stunning” dressing gowns made of expensive Lyons silk, as well as flashy gold and silver waistcoats to seduce provincial beaux.[35] In Honoré de Balzac’s 1843 novel Illusions perdues, the hero is insulted by a true dandy when he appears at the Opéra in a readymade outfit purchased on the Rue de Richelieu. Tellingly, the dandy leans over to his friend and asks dismissively: “who is that young man who looks like a clothed mannequin in front of a tailor’s door?”[36] These tailor’s shops in the arcades were a part of Paris’ commercial geography, which allowed the bourgeoisie to stroll day or night, untroubled by carriages splattering their clothing. By the 1820s, developments in the production of plate glass ensured that the newest arcades were fitted with elaborate shop windows and mirrors.[37] When lit by flickering gaslight, these pyrotechnics produced an almost hallucinatory effect, engineered to foster the illusory link between the dressed bodies of the mannequins and the male consumers gazing at them. The title of the publication Le Narcisse suggests the two-dimensional fashion plate’s role in reflecting the admiring and potentially homoerotic gaze of its readers. In a process of self-reification, the generic but three-dimensional body of the blank-featured mannequin encouraged a potential “Narcissus” to imagine his own body inside the clothes on display, if not to waste away while contemplating the beauty of his own reflection.

      This blurring between animate and inanimate bodies points to a more generalized reification and rationalization of the fashionable male body in consumer culture. Historians like Margot Finn have demonstrated that sophisticated marketing devices, including those aimed at male shoppers, existed earlier and in other geographical locales during the consumer revolution of the eighteenth century.[38] In England, an Early Modern “gentry” masculinity that was not premised upon rational calculation was replaced by more “calculative, rational, and regulated masculinities.”[39] Both David Kuchta and Christopher Breward have explored the advent of the sober suit from seventeenth century onwards as “an appropriate badge” of both “reformed aristocrats and newly emancipated capitalists.”[40] The advent of standardized, geometrically tailored suits and their accompanying mannequins was one of the final phases of this trend towards masculine quantification and restraint. Although common soldiers had long been subject to the tyranny of standardized sizes, the proliferation of both mass-produced mannequins and jackets soon had a psychological impact on female consumers.

Alongside the regulation and rationalization of masculine codes of dress, behaviour, and consumption, there was a growing awareness of the potential for visual and sexual objectification of the tailored body as it navigated public and commercial spaces.

      A vaudeville from 1826, Orthopaedics, or the Tailor for Hunchbacks satirizes the profession of male fashion modelling.[41] One of the central characters is Hector, formerly an artist’s model, whose classicizing name suggests his physical perfection. The script describes him as a “mannequin, model for fashions.” In the play, his employer, the tailor Dubelair (whose French name translates into English as the “tailor of the beautiful look”) hires him to show off eccentric outfits that will “turn the heads of Dandies and Fashionables.” Hector enters singing: “Brilliant model, faithful mirror, I sparkle with light and fire! I wander [vogue] everywhere, setting the vogue, for the new looks in the catalogue.[42] Instructed to stroll in public parks like the Jardin des Tuileries, his dress and demeanour were meant to attract new clients. He would then name his tailor, note the client’s address, and send a tailor’s employee to take his measurements. Like artist’s models, called modèles or sometimes “mannequins vivants,” the fashion model had to be physically attractive to drum up business. Yet whether they worked for artists or tailors, their profession consisted of hiring out their bodies, making their class status ambiguous: they had to be elegant enough to appeal to dandies and poor enough to require a wage. Although they appear in a variety of literary accounts, early fashion modelling is a difficult practice to document archivally. However, the proliferation of sources describing the male mannequin de mode during the July Monarchy suggests that this was at least a small-scale practice from the 1820s through the 1840s.[43]

      In 1844, Jean-Jacques Grandville published the illustrated volume Another World, a satirical voyage through a universe that paralleled contemporary Parisian society. Grandville critiqued the new advertising practice of displaying real garments on figurative representations by animating these anthropomorphic objects [3]:

What do I see on the road? Laced buskins out walking, canes holding their heads high and giving their arms to ladies’ bonnets. Boots walking jauntily with their hats tipped over one ear: this is an extension of the same system. Tailors, hat-makers, bootmakers, milliners, have found a way to do away with the man whom they used as a living signboard. Advertisement has improved itself by becoming simpler.[44]

Grandville’s narrator comments ironically on the cost saving “improvement” of advertising practice. The accessories in this image are an uncanny presence: they replace the body with the objects it wears, raising the spectre of the commodity fetishism Karl Marx later denounced in Capital, whereby social relations were reified and replaced by relationships between objects.[45] It would seem that by the 1840s, some tailors, who once had intimate, tactile interactions with clients, employed live models and then substituted them with shop window dummies. By the 1860s, male playwrights like Auguste Luchet were lamenting the dehumanizing effect of this new regime and the loss of his personal relationship with his tailor: “One is no longer a client, one is a size eighty! A hundred vestimentary factories are leading us towards the absolute and indifferent uniform.”[46] As the trouser suit became the emblem of this democratization during the July Monarchy and tailoring systems based on geometric abstraction enshrined the scientific and political notion of the “homme moyen,” the mannequin’s passively dressed form stood as a further symbol of bourgeois men’s alienation from their bodies. Elizabeth Wilson observes that fear of depersonalization, often expressed through worries about uniformity in dress, haunts modern societies.[47]

      Despite Luchet’s perceptions that he was a number rather than a person, these innovations were often made with the best of socially progressive intentions. One entrepreneurial master tailor, Alexis Lavigne, (1812–80) made a commercial success of democratizing fashionable clothing. A tailor, instructor, and inventor, he was a skillful self-promoter who wrote cutting manuals and invented and patented numerous products.[48] In 1849, Lavigne, who dubbed himself a “tailleur-mannequinier,” was awarded a medal for his “busts for tailors” at the tenth Industrial Exhibition in Paris.[49] Paris had long been famous as a centre for the Beaux-Arts and the luxury trades, but as urban historians like Andre Guillerme remind us, the final decades of the eighteenth century saw Paris transformed into an increasingly important site of industrial production as well.[50] Lavigne’s career trajectory in the garment and mannequin industries illustrates an important shift in the gendering and proliferation of mannequins.

Simple female mannequins had existed alongside male tailor’s dummies in the first half of the nineteenth century but unlike the more lifelike male display mannequin, they were often schematic structures fashioned from wicker or wire and made by basket weavers or tinsmiths.[51] Middle and upper-class women purchased fabrics and brought them to their dressmakers for making-up rather than buying them readymade. After the elite luxury of some Ancien Régime Parisian boutiques with female display mannequins,[52] retail display for women’s clothing in the first half of the century was somewhat rudimentary and based on draping whole lengths of cloth or shawls for effect. The live fashion model, often called a demoiselle-mannequin to distinguish her from her male counterparts, appeared in the context of luxury silk draper’s shops. Unlike the men hired by tailors to walk around in public, the female model only plied her trade in relatively private retail settings for exclusive clients. The first named female model is usually considered to be Marie Worth, who became the wife of the first haute couture designer Charles Frederick Worth. He met her while she worked as a shop girl during the late 1850s, modelling his designs.[53] Other couturiers seem to have quietly adopted the practice of hiring several house models to display couture garments and staging early fashion shows, called mannequin-parades. By 1900, Riotor claimed that mannequin makers were basing their products on casts taken directly from the elegant bodies of these filles-mannequins, thus conflating the bodies of the live model and the shop window dummy and revealing the originally masculine connotations of the term.[54] The turn of the century, the period at which Riotor was feminizing the history of the mannequin as “artificial” woman, was also the apogee of mimetic realism in mannequin design. Pierre Imans achieved worldwide fame for his eerily lifelike wax mannequins with glass eyes and real hair. In his 1907 catalogue, he sold them by first name like dolls or prostitutes, who were not afforded the honour of being titled Mademoiselle or Madame. By this point, the commodification of the female mannequin and her conflation with the prostitute was a common trope, as explored by Caroline Evans in The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America, 1900–1929.[55]

Tailors, who were trained to work with heavy irons and woollen cloth, had traditionally been responsible for making riding habits for horsewomen, but these items formed only a small part of their trade.[56] Female dressmakers worked with lighter, more feminine fabrics like silk and cotton and did not use elaborate pattern-drafting techniques in the first half of the century. With the rise in popularity of sport amongst the bourgeoisie, the horsewoman, called an Amazone in French, took on a new importance. The beauty of the riding habit relied on fit rather than feminine decorations, fabrics, or colours and sculpturally molded the curves of the female body.[57] On a broader level, this form of dress feminized the techniques of geometric abstraction that had long existed in the tailoring trade. Winnifred Aldrich cites the second half of the 1850s as the period when tailors start systematically using scaled pattern systems for cutting women’s jacket patterns.[58]

      In step with these developments, the entrepreneurial Alexis Lavigne began to advertise himself as a “Tailleur pour Dames”. He opened shop at number 3, rue de Rohan in 1857.[59] Lavigne’s business was located in the fashionable area between the Rue de Rivoli and Rue Saint-Honoré, near the Comédie Française and the Louvre. Most importantly, it was close to the Tuileries Palace, principal residence of Emperor Napoleon III and his wife, Eugénie. The Empress, who had a personal stable of some twenty horses, passionately loved both riding and fashion.[60] The master tailor was appointed amazonier or habit-maker to the Second Empire court and to the Empress herself.

      Along with the costumes amazones he advertised, made-to-measure busts became an important part of Lavigne’s business and marketing strategies. The Empress herself owned several of Lavigne’s customized busts to avoid wrinkles when storing her dresses.[61] By this time he had moved up the street to 15, rue de Richelieu, the centre of the tailoring trade in Paris. A sales prospectus for these busts from Lavigne’s publication Journal de l’Habillement (1868) [4] illustrates how this aspect of his early trade in women’s busts intersected with his expertise in making customized riding habits.

The image depicts the horsewoman’s metamorphosis into mannequin and then woman of fashion. On the left, the fully-dressed amazone wears a riding habit. A bust with the initials L.V. or Lavigne stamped on the skirt takes centre stage. At the far right of the lithograph stands a woman wearing a princess-line pinstriped day dress. These mannequins were not made in great quantities at first. However, by 1900 Lavigne’s firm was making much less expensive standardized models and sales figures had risen exponentially to over thirty thousand busts annually.[62] With their blank expressions and identical features, the women in Lavigne’s advertisement resemble mannequins, ready to be dressed in different garments. Between them sits the mute bust, blurring the distinction between inanimate and animate woman, between bodies and their doubles. The image encourages female consumers to identify their own bodies with the busts and to imagine themselves judging the visual effect of their dresses as a third party would, by seeing themselves in the round.

      Although this prospectus is aimed at a wealthy female consumer with the space to display her clothing at home, the bust had even more obvious uses for makers of women’s clothing. Like the increasingly complex cut of men’s coats in the first decades of the nineteenth century, women’s bodice styles in the 1870s and 1880s became increasingly fitted and were often inspired by menswear styles. From about 1865 to the 1890s, there was a boom in the publication of technical books, aids, and methods of cutting and pattern drafting aimed at teaching tailoring techniques to female dressmakers.[63] Alice Guerre-Lavigne followed in her father’s footsteps as a teacher of tailoring techniques for and then by women, and her lessons used mannequins as basic instructional tools. From 1885 to her death in 1924, she and her husband published a professional journal entitled L’Art dans le costume, and she wrote for many other fashion publications.[64] In the inaugural issue she proclaimed that Parisian seamstresses derived their superiority from the fact that they had a complete set of mannequins.[65] While the French journal celebrates the ability of the Parisian couturiere to “set the line” of fashion, it is also blatant self-promotion and advertises a series of seven scaled Lavigne dress forms, from size 38 for slender young women or girls to size 50 for matrons.[66] Competitors also entered the expanding market for these invaluable objects. In 1869 Frédéric Stockman, a Belgian sculptor turned mannequin-maker, launched his own company in Paris and truly industrialized the process of their production.[67] By the 1880s these mute body doubles had become indispensable tools of the trade and took up residence in the homes and studios of professional and home dressmakers. One commentator describing the products of the 1889 Paris World’s Fair noted that “there is hardly a homemaker who does not have her bust, the almost obligatory accessory to the sewing machine.”[68]

      The factory production of mannequins translated into a substantial reduction in their cost: a bust that cost 45 francs in 1867 sold for a mere 12 francs in 1900.[69] Alice Guerre-Lavigne complained in 1885 that while Paris had formerly been the only city where one could purchase busts, increasing international competition was coming from Germany and America, who were “stealing this product.”[70]

“Yes, nowadays the mannequin has entered into our mores. — ‘I am a 42, a 44’ — that number which indicates the half-measure of the bust! — says the amazon.”[71]

      As with the tailor’s dummy, the dress form helped dressmakers translate two-dimensional patterns into three-dimensional garments. Yet as women’s clothing from the 1870s and 1880s illustrates, the dress form was used in even more innovative and creative ways by dressmakers than tailors (5). Pattern drafting and draping are now considered diametrically opposed forms of clothing construction: one is based on flat paper patterns and the other uses the body of the mannequin to work directly in the round. Dressmakers with this versatile new tool at their disposal could use it both for pattern-drafting bodices and draping skirts. Skirts worn over the crinolines of the 1850 and 1860s featured elaborate surface decoration and patterns that struck the eye in new, full-length carte-de-visite photographs, but actual skirt construction was relatively simple and linear. The skirts covering the bustle styles of the 1870s and 1880s achieved visual interest through more freeform, asymmetrical, and sculptural techniques of draping and pinning, effects that were enabled by the advent of the mannequin in the late 1860s. The dress form arose in tandem with innovations in the technology of support garments, including steam-moulded corsets, which produced more standardized silhouettes for the fashionable female body.[72] The corseted, contained shape of the mannequin’s three-dimensional body could be attired in a wire bustle and the seamstress could study the fall and drape of the fabric in order to create the skirt silhouette she desired. Just like the feminized body derived from the male mannequin, an 1885 dress by Madame Tridou becomes a hybrid of masculine and feminine cut, construction, and fabrics [5]:

       The silk-lined lapels and false waistcoat allude to menswear while volumetric skirts and the exaggerated shelf bustle emphasize the roundness of the female buttocks. The upper body was constructed through pattern drafting and its lower half through draping, while the whole dress rhythmically alternates matte masculine wool with the sheen of feminine silk.

Like her male counterpart, the female shop window dummy soliciting customers in the large plate-glass windows of the new department stores garnered the most literary and visual attention. These bodies on the newly fashionable boulevards of Haussmann’s Paris replaced the display mannequins standing outside of traditional tailoring establishments in the arcades. Émile Zola famously described the étalage of mannequins in the 1883 novel Au Bonheur des Dames, set in the late 1860s, but James Tissot’s canvas The Shopgirl (La demoiselle de magasin), painted between 1883–5 as part of a series on the women of Paris, is one of the representations of a shop window dummy in a painting [6].[73]

FIGURE 6

James Tissot, La Demoiselle de magasin, c. 1883-1885. Oil on canvas, overall: 146.1 x 101.6 cm. Gift from Corporations' Subscription Fund, 1968. © 2018 Art Gallery of Ontario.

In the glass window of a shop selling ribbons and trimmings, the artist has placed a headless and limbless female bust clothed in what looks like burgundy velvet elaborately embroidered with gold thread.[74] There are in fact three torsos in the picture, the two shop girls and the dummy. Their busts are identical in shape and size, and could easily be the same body seen from the side, back, and front respectively, a standard device in fashion-plate iconography. These women resemble one another, they are “types” cast from the same mould. The image implies that the corseted shop girl and the mannequin are sisters — the gaze of the male stroller looking through the window suggests that both bodies are potentially for sale. As the naturalist writer Alexandre Hepp lamented in an article written in the same year as Tissot’s work, contemporary Parisian women seemed increasingly mannequin-like:

On your arm, you have a woman who seems superior to all others… and suddenly, as you turn a corner, you encounter another woman — who resembles yours “like a sister.” They are in effect daughters of the same mannequin… That elegance you thought unique is churned out in a hundred thousand copies, illustrated in a catalogue and shipped, postage paid, to the ends of the earth.[75]

The mannequin proved an easy target for expressions of disgust with new forms of commodity culture like the “unoriginal” and standardized clothing on sale in department stores. Hepp’s commentary echoes larger anxieties during the 1880s and 1890s over the commercial and aesthetic decline of the Parisian luxury trades in the face of increasing foreign competition from American and German industrialists.[76]

While the tailor’s dummy could still be considered a rationalized, practical tool of the trade, male commentators from Riotor to Benjamin consistently eroticized the female mannequin, or “wommanequin,” as Hillel Schwartz calls her, eliding the difference between cloth and female flesh, between practical and sexual object in a period that also saw the invention of “Parisian rubber articles,” which were lifelike sex dolls.[77]

Julie Parks argues that Enlightenment fashion dolls “emblematize the more ontological issues of how consumer societies confuse the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ selfhood, thus throwing into question the viability of a ‘real’ self.”[78] Likewise, during the July Monarchy, the mannequin became a cipher for the superficiality of elite society and the potential for confusion between real and imagined personae. Since the time of Rousseau, critics had railed against fashion’s artifice, which is featured in Charles Philipon’s scathingly humorous caricature of 1830 in the journal La Silhouette [7].

FIGURE 7

Charles Philipon, “Les fashionables,” from La Silhouette, February 11th, 1830. Paris: Cabinet des Estampes, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

“Les Fashionables” are male and female versions of the same doll. Of equal height, they have the same cinched waists, overdone hairstyles, and gigot sleeves. The couple has spawned not children but smaller-scale imitations of themselves:

The Fashionables are spring-mounted dolls that drink, eat and act like natural humans. These little machines, modeled after the very type of ideal beauty, are astonishingly perfect…You can see them daily between the hours of three and four at the Tuileries Gardens without paying an entrance fee… Fashionables can be installed in any parlour where they are desired.[79]

Dressed mannequins and fashion dolls taunted contemporaries with the fear that in the modern city, beauty might only be cloth-deep.

      In a chapter entitled “Just like Longchamps,” Grandville takes up this theme. Longchamps was a racetrack in Paris where the wealthy rode on horseback and in carriages to show off the latest fashions. In this alternate yet familiar universe, the narrator encounters a carriageway devoid of upper-class humans. The only live beings are animals and servants [8]. In this world where clothing is more important than the people wearing it, Grandville’s frustrated narrator finds his vision obscured and the bodies of the wealthy replaced by plaster, wood, or wax sosies or body doubles:

Try as I might to peer past the blinds of carriage windows, I can only catch glimpses of wigs or hats on wooden heads. In some of them, there are mannequins dressed with the most studied elegance and the greatest luxury. It seems that in this country the fashion is to have oneself replaced in public promenades by body doubles (sosies) made out of plaster, wood or wax. Elegance is created in effigy… And indeed what good is the rest of the person? One only goes there to look at the clothes. It was while pondering the solemnities of fashion, that the prophet cried out: Mannequin of mannequins, and all is but mannequin![80]

While Grandville’s satire is aimed at the idle rich, immobile men and women who pose stylishly as they are driven along in their luxuriously appointed carriages, the gender dynamic of this cultural critique metamorphoses along with the feminization of the mannequin itself. Alexandre Hepp’s vilification of the department store mannequin in the 1880s echoes tropes surrounding the commodification of the fashionable female body in fin-de-siècle Paris:

The Mannequin has killed summer’s froufrous, its sprightly allure and grace, and menaces the whole art of fashion. The Mannequin, that hideous machine with a human form, which stands at attention the length of the rooms of the Louvre, the Bon Marché, Printemps, in front of the facades on street corners, on sidewalks, its grey carcass stuffed with bran, a number scribbled in ink in place of a heart.[81]

The nineteenth century’s swift adoption and acceptance of the mannequin as functional tool for making clothing stands in stark contrast with its disparagement of the mannequin used to sell it.

Far from “menacing the whole art of fashion,” this three-dimensional body double provided the necessary technology for late nineteenth-century dressmakers like Madame Tridou to drape skirts in unique and individualized ways.

      Walter Benjamin and the Surrealists took up the theme of the female mannequin as carcass or corpse in the early twentieth century.[82] These inert bodies were then free to serve as artist’s muses, as projections for the sexual fantasies of the Surrealists. By the first half of the twentieth century, the eroticized female mannequin became what Hillel Schwartz calls the “enabling fiction” for a new generation of writers, philosophers, photographers, and painters.[83] Yet while male writers and artists eroticized and reconfigured, even traumatized her prefabricated body as a spur for their creativity, female designers and dressmakers continued to employ her body to create new objects for women in different but no less innovative ways. The mannequin allowed early twentieth-century couturières like the four female designers Callot Soeurs to conceive, shape, and fashion clothing into radically different designs and structures [9], but because their creativity resulted in commercially successful garments like this draped evening dress rather than “high” art, their creativity has been underappreciated in the historical record.

Using the mannequin, Callot Soeurs and others trained a new generation of groundbreaking and socially progressive female couturières like Madeleine Vionnet (1876–1975), who eschewed pattern drafting altogether and used these techniques to drape the entire body in bias-cut clothing that allowed women to move freely [10]. An iconic photograph shows Vionnet working with her “half-size” 80cm mannequine, a term that suggests that its owner deliberately re-feminized it.[84]

FIGURE 10

Thérèse Bonney, Madeleine Vionnet and her mannequine (ca. 1923–6). BANC PIC 1982.111 ser. 15. Thérèse Bonney Photograph Collection, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.