MANNEQUINS IN CARTOONS

Great collection of funny cartoons about mannequins.

MANNEQUINS ANIME

THE SUCCONS

Japanesse Sitcome By Yoshimasa Ishibashi (2002)

The Fuccons are a Japanese sitcoms and its originality and Bizzaria quickly became a cult.

Premiered in the original Oh! Mikey, it characterized to be fully played by mannequins property.  The program has as its protagonist an American family that moved to Japan, composed by father James, mother Barbara and little Mikey Fuccon.  

THE ALLURE OF THE FAKE : MANNEQUIN MEMORIAL DAY 

According to the japanese calendar of ephimery events “Metropolis”, the celebration of when mannequins where used for the first time in this country is celebrated on March 24^th.  The connotation of the word “mannequin” has a very coherent meaning in Japanese, sounding like mane (calling) and kin (money).  The tridimensional figures are known as very efficient sales person who work 24 hours a day.

MANGA-ESQUE MANNEQUINS

Japanese have Mannequins partly because they are animistic, or ego invested in their bodies. Other ways of having mannequins that are acceptably non-human is to have headless mannequins or, recently, the manga-esque mannequins like those above.  I think that one of the reasons why Western mannequins are now less popular is due to the fact that with increasing numbers of westerners living in Japan, such manequinns, and indeed foreigners themselves, have started to look human.

MANNEQUIN • 7 DEADLY SINS

Also known as capital vices, is a list of seven sins that, in Catholicism, are the most serious. Mannequins reveal many of these deadly sins in their multi-functional forms. 

-Sloth, the physical laziness or not to react to the life.

The use of mannequins manifests sloth because many times they are used as a replacement of real human beings, and overcome the line where being practical may turn into laziness.  In publicity, for example, many actors lose their jobs or aren’t even taken into account, because producers notice that it is easier and cheaper to use real-life dummies.

-Pride, the desire to be superior to others.

Mannequins used to sell fashion are also selling pride.  Clothing items bring with them a great social and economic value for people to feel superior to others in a materialistic way. The desire to feel more fashionable is a symbol of wealth, and the function of all fashion mannequins is to provide a higher visual standard and make clothes desirable to the eye.

-Greed, the irrepressible desire for material goods.

As with pride, mannequins contribute with the unstoppable and unconscious consumerism that is leading us to an ecological crisis.  Fashion and clothes are the most consumed products in the industry, due to the changes of season and to the endless desire of being hip, posh, stylish.  Clothes are powerful symbols to show power, sophistication and class, so people are drawn by the power that mannequins have to sell these products despite their actual need for clothes. 

-Envy, to desire the happiness of others, perceived as a source of frustration

Mannequins always project how women should look in order to be beautiful.  The clothes they expose should be made for women or men with their same figure and physical qualities, so they create a physical standard of the human body that everyone must follow.  Women or men that lack this kind of physical appearance, feel envy of those who follow exactly the mannequin’s beauty canons.

-Lust, huge sexual appetite an end in itself

-Gluttony, huge appetite for the pleasures of the table, eating more than necessary just for pleasure

-Wrath, the burning desire of a violent revenge after a wrong suffered.

MANNEQUIN MAIL STAMPS

MANNEQUIN SENSATIONS

Touch

They are always polished, plane, and soft, but very hard and stiff.  Their lack of movement and natural surface makes you recognize that it is in fact a fake representation of your own race, although by following their form with your finger you experience quite a similarity.  Their proportions are recognized by our hands because they assemble our same bone and skin structure, so it is interesting to make the exercise of recognizing our parts in an object just using this sense.

Smell

Mannequins, despite the material they are made of, always bring the smell of the “new”.  They immediately are associated with new clothing stores that have that sense of plastic, unpolluted, fresh smell that many stores have.  They keep this smell especially because they are always wearing new clothing items that refresh it all the time.   Most of the fiber-glass made mannequins …   

Sight

Seeing a representation of you as an inanimate object is very different as observing another human being.  Especially when they are high-tech dummies, with the purpose of simulating the human form perfectly, we can never be cheated by one of these figures.  Their eyes and static manners can never be as real as our own, but they create a kind of mystery that makes us keep staring at them.  It’s interesting to notice their details, and finding out that probably the creator had to spend a lot of time analyzing his very particular forms in order to reproduce it.  

Hearing

Mannequins are hard and static.  They are usually stiff and produce hard drumming sounds when their parts crush together, but as most of them are hollow in the inside, there’s always an echo that guides you to perceive they are not as full of life as you are.

Taste

Mannequins have a cold taste.  Their surface extension and usual materials make them cold figures to the tongue.  It is difficult to perceive a generic taste in the diverse material mannequins, but the similarity is that it is hard to perceive them all.  Mannequins have a neutral taste that can’t be appreciated well because of their smoothness, so there is definitely a lack of perception with this sense.

MANNEQUIN COVERS

THE MANNEQUIN HOUSE
R.N. MORRIS

When Detective Inspector Silas Quinn is called in to investigate the death of one of the employees - a young female mannequin from the women's costumes department - he gets more than he bargained for. The principal suspect is a fez-wearing monkey who is the only "person" in the room with the murdered girl and the room is locked from the inside.

MANNEQUIN

OLIVIA BEST

A steamy contemporary erotic romance novella set in the glamorous high fashion modelling industry in New York City.

MANNEQUIN REFLECTION

GEORGE KOLLAR

George Kollar's series of photographs are layers of reality, pure examples of photographic seeing that reveal a unique depth of field. The emanation of mannequin and reflection, light and form, presents a new and unusual visual language through chance juxtapositions that lifts the veil on constructed reality and representation.

MANNEQUIN SERIES ONE NEIL CHAPMAN

A critic for Artweek magazine called this series of work, "Social Allegories." That has remained for the past decades. Mannequin Series One is a project of social allegories.

MANNEQUIN RISING

ROY MIKI

This book is a series of poems that are interspersed with the author’s photomontages, many of which contain storefront mannequins superimposed with images of pedestrians in the street. The mannequins can be taken as metaphorical commentary on the human figures in the frames; static and passive.

 

COUNTER CULTURE: THE ALLURE OF MINI-MANNEQUINS

LOUISE FILI AND STEVEN HELLER 

In Counter Culture, Steven Heller and Louise Fili take the author on a colorful peep show of these sexy, sometimes erotic, but always fetishistic, plaster bodies and body parts. Theirs is a surreal look at how mannequins play on consumers' desires, acting as agents of seduction, beckoning us toward that ultimate act--the consumption of goods. 

MANNEQUIN IN FASHION

When we think about mannequins, the first thing that pops into our minds is fashion and dummies being used to wear and sell clothes.  The first fashion mannequins, made of papier-mâché, were made in France in the mid-19th century.  Mannequins were later made of wax to produce a more lifelike appearance. In the 1920s, wax was supplanted by a more durable composite made with plaster.  Some modern mannequins are made of molded plastic. Mannequins are used extensively for the display of clothing in stores and in shop windows, and as decoration.

Mannequins are part of a psychological advertising strategy for designing fashion window displays to attract customers.  Before going inside any store, we first take a look at what the mannequins are wearing so that we can decide if that’s the shop we want to spend money in. Mannequins showcase the best of each store’s fashion and intrigue people to come inside.

They are the most powerful element for places that need to sale merchandise in large quantities, and there’s a complete way of art around display design in order for them to be more attractive to the eye of new sellers.

What are the latest and more innovative trends to use mannequins as fashion displays?

MARIONETTEBOTS

At a very famous clothing-store in Tokio, clothes are being displayed with half-mannequin half-robot dummies wired with Kinect technology to mimic the movements of anyone facing them.