V OL U M E 1

Body Doubles:
The Origins of the Fashion
Mannequin
BY ALISON MATTHEWS DAVID
https://doi.org/10.38055/FS010107
Abstract: This article traces the origins of the mannequin and challenges the
gender assumptions it has been cloaked in. In nineteenth-century Paris, the fashion
mannequin became a key technology in the construction of normative bodies,
a principal “actor” in shaping current clothing cultures, and literally embodied
debates over creativity and commodifcation. It locates the origins of the mannequin
and the advent of live male fashion models in the bespoke tailoring practices of the
1820s, several decades before the female fashion model appeared on the scene.
It ties the mannequin to larger shifts in the mass-production, standardization,
and literal dehumanization of clothing production and consumption. As male
tailors were put out of business by the proliferation of mass-produced clothing in
standardized sizes, innovators like Alexis Lavigne and his daughter Alice Guerre-
Lavigne made, marketed, and mass-produced feminized mannequins and taught
tailoring techniques to and for a new generation of women. Starting in the 1870s
and 80s, seamstresses used these new workshop tools to construct and drape
innovative garments. Despite the vilifcation of the mannequin as a cipher for the
superfciality and lack of individuality of fashionable displays in the modern urban
landscape, early twentieth-century couturières like Callot Soeurs and Madeleine
Vionnet ultimately used mannequins to produce genuinely creative clothing that
freed the elite female body and allowed it new forms of mobility.

KEYWORDS

• mannequin
• gender
• fashion
• Paris
• seamstress
• tailor
Body Doubles: The Origins of the Fashion Mannequin

Contextual Introduction

Like garments, academic articles are largely produced “backstage”

and the labour that goes into them is equally unseen. I am thrilled
to fnally 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 feld
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 refect the expanding literature in our
feld, 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 refecting 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
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Body Doubles: The Origins of the Fashion Mannequin

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

frst 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 frst
paid position at the Winchester School of Art in 2002. Barbara,
along with Lesley Miller and Judith Attfeld, 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 feld 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
(formerly Ryerson 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
Ryerson’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 feld 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 feld of
Fashion Studies and the generosity of my community of scholars,
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creative practitioners, and students. Thank you all.

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Body Doubles: The Origins of the Fashion Mannequin

“Mannequin of mannequins,
and all is but mannequin!”
– J.J Grandville,
Un autre monde, 1844

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 fgures. 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 specifc terms to differentiate between
these diverse fgures, the French word mannequin designates
artists’, tailors’, and dressmakers’ dummies as well as the live,
professional fashion model. Miniature, articulated wooden people
called lay-fgures 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 fgure who struts across the catwalk and scrolls down
the screens of social media feeds.
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Body Doubles: The Origins of the Fashion Mannequin

As the use of one word for these multiple

animate and inanimate bodies suggests, the
French mannequin is a shape-shifter, who
blurs the boundaries between death and life,
female and male, and continues to populate
the spaces of labour and commerce.
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 commodifcation in nineteenth-century
Paris.

In 1900, Léon Riotor published the frst 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 feld.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 commodifed, 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,
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Body Doubles: The Origins of the Fashion Mannequin

demonstrating that male mannequins are key to our understanding

of how fashion envisioned and reifed 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 fesh 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 fn-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 fn-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
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Body Doubles: The Origins of the Fashion Mannequin

The Mannequin’s Prehistory

Before embarking on a study of the nineteenth century, a short

prehistory places the mannequin in context. The frst 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 ffteenth 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 diffcult to document.

Yet because of their gender and function,

I believe that these painter’s “lay-fgures,”
rather than female fashion dolls, are the
true ancestors of the frst commercial
dummies used specifcally to design and
display actual, full-scale male fashions in the
nineteenth century.15
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 fngers, which are poseable and
individually articulated [1]. By the mid-eighteenth century, the
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Body Doubles: The Origins of the Fashion Mannequin

FIGURE 1
François Roubiliac, Articulated Artist’s Lay-Figure, Front and Back
view, ca. 1740. Skeleton of bronze overlaid with cork, horsehair,
wool, and an outer covering of silk stockinette, with a carved
wooden and painted head. 76 cms. © Museum of London.
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Body Doubles: The Origins of the Fashion Mannequin

French had become the most prominent makers of luxury, life-

sized, articulated padded mannequins perfectionnés, complete
with silk cloth “fesh” 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.

Mannequin Chic?

As with the lay-fgure, the exact origins of the mannequin as tailor’s

dummy are diffcult 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 artifcial but superfcially 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 ft: 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
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Body Doubles: The Origins of the Fashion Mannequin

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.
23
The fnal garment was then adjusted on the client’s body during
several ftting 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 infuenced tailoring systems and practices.25
During the frst 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 fat 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 diffcult 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.
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Body Doubles: The Origins of the Fashion Mannequin

In the art world, mannequins helped artists

translate the three-dimensional, clothed
bodies of their sitters onto the fat, two-
dimensional surface of the canvas.
The fashion mannequin reversed this dynamic, allowing the tailor to
take a fat, 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 fgures 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-fgure before it, in theory the tailor’s dummy

dispensed with the need for busy bourgeois clients to “sit” for
lengthy fttings. 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 frst half of the nineteenth century responded to consumer
demand for the rapid production of more ftted, elegant suits. On
the lower end of the scale, block fgures 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 fxed 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
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Body Doubles: The Origins of the Fashion Mannequin

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]. Bolts of cloth line the walls of a room illuminated by

FIGURE 2
A tailor’s dummy in the workshop, ca. 1826–9. Pen and ink. Paris:
Cabinet des Estampes, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
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Body Doubles: The Origins of the Fashion Mannequin

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-ftting 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 ft and hang of the fnished
garment. There is a row of completed frock and cutaway coats
strangely foating 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 frst 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 fesh 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.
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New Actors

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 suffcient coherence
to perform actions, produce effects, and alter situations.”32 The
mannequin changed the way cloth and humans interacted with
the body through a normative and standardized intermediary,
altering or sometimes even replacing the feshly 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.
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The master tailor and his client are no

longer present, nor are they involved in
the intimate dialogue that was necessary
to produce an elegant suit of clothes. This
omission may seem minor, but it heralds
a shift in the embodied, physical, and
emotional relationship between
maker and client.
It enabled the mass-production of garments, which has bequeathed
us an often-bitter legacy of alienated labour, unhappy consumers,
and ill-ftting and environmentally deleterious fast fashion.

Narcissistic Mannequins

The tailor’s “block” or dummy and its brother produced for retail
display arose in parallel during the frst 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.
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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 redefned during
the 1830s and 1840s as a space for leisurely visual enjoyment and
consumption.34

Mannequins were a new element of the

spectacle and writers and caricaturists
were quick to comment on these
sometimes-disturbing commodities
inhabiting the equally novel spaces of the
Parisian arcades.
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 fashy 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 outft 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 ftted with elaborate shop windows
and mirrors.37 When lit by fickering 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
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refecting the admiring and potentially homoerotic gaze of its

readers. In a process of self-reifcation, 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 refection.

This blurring between animate and inanimate bodies points

to a more generalized reifcation 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 fnal phases of this trend towards masculine
quantifcation and restraint.

While the practical tailor’s bust had a

clear use value in the Marxist sense, shop
window dummies and fashion models were
always-already commodities and can be
read as literal embodiments of exchange
value and alienated labour.
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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 objectifcation 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 outfts that will “turn the heads
of Dandies and Fashionables.” Hector enters singing: “Brilliant
model, faithful mirror, I sparkle with light and fre! 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
diffcult 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 fgurative
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
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FIGURE 3
Un voyage d’avril, from Jean-Jacques Grandville, Un autre monde,
1844. Paris: H. Fournier. Courtesy of Toronto Public Library.
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Body Doubles: The Origins of the Fashion Mannequin

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 reifed 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 scientifc 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 fnal 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.
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Sex Changes: The Female Mannequin

Simple female mannequins had existed alongside male tailor’s

dummies in the frst 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 frst 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 frst named female model is
usually considered to be Marie Worth, who became the wife of the
frst 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 flles-mannequins, thus confating 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 “artifcial” 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 frst name like dolls
or prostitutes, who were not afforded the honour of being titled
Mademoiselle or Madame. By this point, the commodifcation of
the female mannequin and her confation 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
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How did this transition occur in the mid-

nineteenth century? The rise of ready-
made clothing in the menswear sector
put many custom tailors out of business
and encouraged others to turn to a new
clientele: women.
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. Female dressmakers worked with lighter, more feminine
fabrics like silk and cotton and did not use elaborate pattern-
drafting techniques in the frst 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 ft 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.
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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

FIGURE 4
Alexis Lavigne, Sales Prospectus for Riding Habits
and Custom-made Busts, ca. 1868. Paris: Cabinet des
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Body Doubles: The Origins of the Fashion Mannequin

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 frst. However, by 1900 Lavigne’s
frm was making much less expensive standardized models and
sales fgures 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 frst decades
of the nineteenth century, women’s bodice styles in the 1870s
and 1880s became increasingly ftted 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
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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 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.

They began to internalize a system familiar

to us in the twenty-frst century — the novel
fact that their body size corresponded to a
numeric measurement.
“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 fat paper patterns and the
other uses the body of the mannequin to work directly in the round.
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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]:

http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O117701/
dress-tridou-madame/.

FIGURE 5

(available at the above URL)

Madame Cridon, Day Dress with ftted bodice and draped skirt, 1885.
Brown wool and silk. London: Victoria and Albert Museum.
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Body Doubles: The Origins of the Fashion Mannequin

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.

“That hideous machine with a human

form”

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 In the
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Body Doubles: The Origins of the Fashion Mannequin

FIGURE 6
James Tissot, La Demoiselle de magasin, c. 1883–5.
Oil on canvas, overall: 146.1 x 101.6 cm. Gift from
Corporations’ Subscription Fund, 1968. © 2018 Art
Gallery of Ontario.
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Body Doubles: The Origins of the Fashion Mannequin

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
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Because of its links with science and

technological progress, the artifcial/
mechanical body of the male mannequin
found easier acceptance than its female
counterpart as a mass-produced, clearly
“unnatural” product of industry.
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 fesh, between practical and sexual
object in a period that also saw the invention of “Parisian rubber
articles,” which were lifelike sex dolls.77

Elegance in Effgy

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 superfciality
of elite society and the potential for confusion between real and
imagined personae. Since the time of Rousseau, critics had railed
against fashion’s artifce, which is featured in Charles Philipon’s
scathingly humorous caricature of 1830 in the journal La Silhouette
[7]. “Les Fashionables” are male and female versions of the same
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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.

FIGURE 7 In a chapter entitled “Just like Longchamps,” Grandville

takes up this theme. Longchamps was a racetrack in Paris where
Charles Philipon, “Les fashionables,”
the wealthy rode on horseback and in carriages to show off the
from La Silhouette, February 11th, 1830.
latest fashions. In this alternate yet familiar universe, the narrator
Paris: Cabinet des Estampes, Bibliothèque
Nationale de France.
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 fnds 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 effgy…
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
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FIGURE 8
Comme à Longchamps from Jean-Jacques Grandville, Un
autre monde, 1844. Paris: H. Fournier. Courtesy Toronto
Public Library.
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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 vilifcation of the department
store mannequin in the 1880s echoes tropes surrounding the
commodifcation of the fashionable female body in fn-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.
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While male critics of capitalism saw in the

mannequin a soulless manifestation of the
commodity fetish, as a functional tool it
helped tailors and dressmakers produce
and sell the fashionable facades that were
a necessary if contested part of living in
modern cities.

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 frst
half of the twentieth century, the eroticized female mannequin
became what Hillel Schwartz calls the “enabling fction” for a new
generation of writers, philosophers, photographers, and painters.83
Yet while male writers and artists eroticized and reconfgured, 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.
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FIGURE 9
Left: Callot Soeurs dress (1915-16).
Purchase, Irene Lewisohn Bequest,
1951. Accession no. C.I.51.97.2a, b.
Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Right: Callot Evening Gown (ca. 1915).

Photograph by Philippe Ortiz. Control
no. 2002714470. George Grantham Bain
Collection, Library of Congress. 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 In the couture house, the
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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.
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mannequin’s ties to “art” were re-established. Yet while painters

had used their lay-fgures as mere clotheshorses, the fashion
mannequin helped to change the entire process of creating frst
men’s and then women’s clothing over the course of a century.
From a tool that helped tailors translate two-dimensional patterns
onto a three-dimensional body, it became the means through
which radically new forms of women’s clothing could be draped
and sculpted without the use of patterns at all. The immobile
bodies of shop window dummies posing in perfect, uncreased
suits may have created “elegance in effgy,” yet in the hands of
skilled makers of clothing, the mannequin could also be used as a
blank, three-dimensional canvas to transform fat, inanimate cloth
into sculptural forms on live bodies in motion.
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Endnotes

1
W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
(Z1, 2), 2002, p. 694.

2
At the School of Fashion where I teach, they are familiarly known as “Judies” and “Jimmies” for female and male
forms respectively.

3
“L’histoire du mannequin? C’est l’histoire de la femme elle-même, non pas celle de la nature, celle de nos goûts
maniérés ou pervers, celle aux lignes fgées par la mode.” Riotor in Le mannequin, p. 29.

4
C. Evans, “Masks, Mirrors, and Mannequins: Elsa Schiaparelli and the Decentered Subject,” Fashion Theory, vol.
3, no. 1, 1999, p. 3-32; S. K. Schneider, Vital Mummies: Performance Design for the Shop Window Mannequin, New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1995; U. Lehmann, “Stripping Her Bare: the Mannequin in Surrealism,” in Addressing
the Century: 100 Years of Art & Fashion, London: Hayward Gallery, 1998; T. Grönberg, “Beware the Beautiful
Women: the 1920s Shopwindow Mannequin and a Physiognomy of Effacement,” Art History, vol. 20, no. 3, 1997,
p. 375-96; L. Conor, “The Mannequin in the Commodity Scene” in The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine
Visibility in the 1920s, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004, p. 105-28; V. Osborne, “The
Logic of the Mannequin: Shopwindows and the Realist Novel,” in J. Potvin, ed., The Places and Spaces of Fashion,
1800–2007, New York: Routledge, 2009, p. 186-99; E. R. Klug, “Mannequins and Display in America, 1935–70,” in
J. Potvin, ed., The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800–2007, New York: Routledge, 2009, p. 200-13; E. Marshall
Orr, J. Yuzna, M. Russell, Ralph Pucci: The Art of the Mannequin, New York: Museum of Arts and Design, 2015. Lou
Taylor has also discussed its history and use in fashion museum displays, The Study of Dress History, Manchester:
University of Manchester Press, 2002, p. 26-47.

5
K. Miller, Doubles; Studies in Literary History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985; S. Freud, The Uncanny, Trans.
David McLintock, New York: Penguin, 2003.

6
In France, professional male and female models are still called mannequins. The frst live fashion shows were
called “mannequin parades” in English.

7
V. Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History, 3rd edition, London: Bloomsbury, 2017; A. Rocamora, Fashioning the
City: Paris, Fashion and the Media, London: I.B. Tauris, 2009.

8
A. Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1986. See also J. Munro, “Vivifed Commodities: Paris and the Development of the Fashion Mannequin,”
Chapter 9 of Silent Partners, p. 167-89.

9
L. Riotor, Le mannequin, Paris: Bibliothèque Artistique et Littéraire, 1900, p. 96.
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10
In her book on fashion dolls, Juliet Peers states that most of the sources on the history of fashion dolls quote
uncritically from Max Von Boehn’s unfootnoted work on dolls in the 1920s, in Fashion Doll: from Bébé Jumeau to
Barbie, Oxford: Berg, 2004, p. 17-9; Y.C. Croizat, “‘Living Dolls’: François 1er Dresses His Women,” Renaissance
Quarterly, vol. 60, 2007, p. 94-130; J. Park, “Appearing Natural, Becoming Strange: The Self as Mimetic Object,”
Chapter 3 in The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England, Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2009.
11
Notably Jane Munro, Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish, New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2014.

12
Hillel Schwartz suggests that Masaccio, one of the frst Italian painters to render realistic fgures, may have used a
mannequin. The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles, New York: Zone Books, 1996,
p. 107; Munro, p. 13.

13
Schwartz, p. 107; Munro, p. 34-5.

14
For an excellent summary of their use in painting drapery, see Munro, “Casting Stuffs: ‘All Poetry,’” In Silent
Partners, p. 26-9.

15
Intriguingly, just as the frst suits developed from the need for ftted, padded under-armour that allowed the
body to move, “Medieval Knights in the off season hung their suits of armour upon dummies called dobbles” (or
doubles?). Schwartz, p. 112.

16
The artist’s term lay-fgure also comes from Middle Dutch, from leeman or “limb-man.” These early mannequins
were usually made of wood with metal articulations. They were padded and covered with fabric to produce a
lifelike body.

17
Objects like these were valuable enough to be resold and this one was purchased in the 1760s by the English
genre painter Arthur Devis. Polite Society by Arthur Devis,1712–1787: Portraits of the English Country Gentleman
and His Family, Preston: Harris Museum and Art Gallery, 1983, catalogue nos. 55 & 56, 67.

18
Munro, p. 39.

H. Hahn, “Fashion Discourses in Fashion Magazines and Madame de Girardin’s Lettres Parisiennes in July-
19

Monarchy France (1830–1848),” Fashion Theory, vol. 9, no. 2, 2005, p. 221.

20
See for example, C. Baudelaire, “Du chic et du poncif,” Salon de 1846, p. 163-4.

21
R. Roslak, “Artisans, Consumers, and Corporeality in Signac’s Parisian Interiors,” Art History, vol. 29, no. 5, 2006,
p. 883.

22
A. Hollander, Sex and Suits, New York: Knopf, 1994, p. 89.

23
A. Matthews David, “Made to Measure? Tailoring and the ‘Normal’ Body in Nineteenth-Century France,” in W.
Ernst, ed., Histories of the Normal and Abnormal: Social and Cultural Histories of Norms and Normativity, London
and New York: Routledge, 2006, p. 142-64.
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24
I. Hacking, The Taming of Chance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

25
M. Charpy, “Adjustments: Bodies and Clothing in Standard Industrial Sizes During the 19th Century,” Modes
Pratiques. Revue d’histoire du vêtement et de la mode, “Special Issue,” vol. 3, février 2018, p. 190.

C. Beck, Notice explicative sur le costumomètre et le longimètre, instruments indispensables aux tailleurs et aux
26

personnes qui, sans l’aide d’aucun maître, veulent couper et confectionner toutes sortes de vêtements d’hommes
ou de femmes. n.p. Paris, 1819, 11-19; F. Chenoune, Des modes et des hommes, Paris: Flammarion, 1993, p. 44.

While the mass-produced mannequin becomes standard, some mannequiniers advertised both ready-made and
27

made-to-measure busts in 1900, including Stockman and Charles Weiss, at 25 rue de Bichat, Annuaire-almanach
du commerce, de l’industrie, de la magistrature et de l’administration, Paris, 1900, p. 1971-2.

28
Annuaire-almanach, p. 1971-2.

29
Charpy, p. 194.

30
“Il vient encore de paraître à Paris un mannequin-mécanique d’une nouvelle invention; il est, dit-on, d’une très
grande utilité aux tailleurs, puisque c’est sur cette mécanique qu’ils pourront essayer tout espèce d’habillement,
et s’assurer d’avance, par un mécanisme aussi ingénieux qu’immédiat, s’il y aura ou non poignard à chaque pièce
qu’ils essaieront sur ce mannequin qu’on peut appeler sans pareil.” M. Couanon, ed., Journal des marchands-
tailleurs, septembre 1839, p. 259.

31
Entwistle does not mention the mannequin specifcally but this avenue of theorization could be productive for
future studies of it. J. Entwistle, “Bruno Latour: Actor-Network Theory and Fashion” in A. Rocamora and A. Smelik,
eds., Thinking Through Fashion, London: I.B. Tauris, 2016, p. 271.

32
Jane Bennett, “The Force of Things: Steps Toward an Ecology of Matter,” Political Theory, vol. 32, no. 3, 2004,
p. 355.

33
“Bustes d’homme à l’usage de MM.les Tailleurs, exécutés d’après un nouveau procédé, et d’une construction
très-solide, aux prix les plus modérés. Le directeur s’empresse d’annoncer à MM.les Tailleurs qu’il se charge de
faire exécuter, sur toutes sortes de tailles, des bustes d’homme dont la forme est proportionnée selon la méthode
qu’il enseigne. Ces bustes dont la précision et l’élégance se joignent à l’utilité pour l’essai des vêtements, ajoutent
à l’ornement des magasins ou des salons les plus élégants.” Le Narcisse, album de l’élégant, revue générale des
mode fashionables parisiennes, Paris: Imprimerie Cordier, 1er décembre 1831, p. 8.

34
Hahn in “Fashion Discourses,” p. 206. For more on the history of painted and sculpted street signs as advertising,
see R. Wrigley, “Between the Street and the Salon: Parisian Signs and the Spaces of Professionalism in the
Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” Oxford Art Journal, vol. 21, no. 1, 1998, p. 49.

35
“Les tailleurs des passages ont presque tous à leur porte un mannequin habillé… ils ont de plus qu’eux des
robes de chambre ébouriffantes, dont la plus grande partie est en soie de Lyon, et qu’ils vendent à très-haut prix;
et des gilets d’or et d’argent qui plaisent aux beaux de Carpenteras.” R. de Beauvoir, “Le Tailleur,” in Les Français
peints par eux-mêmes, Paris: L. Curmer, 1841, p. 244.
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36
H. de Balzac, Illusions perdues, vol. 5, Paris: Pléiade, 1837, p. 194.

37
M. Marrinan, Romantic Paris: Histories of a Cultural Landscape, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009, p. 282.

38
“Men’s Things: Masculine Possession in the Consumer Revolution.” Social History, vol. 25, no. 2, 2000, p. 135.

39
Finn, p. 154.

C. Breward, The Suit, London: Reaktion, 2016, p. 17. See also D. Kuchta’s classic text The Three-Piece Suit and
40

Modern Masculinity: England, 1550–1850, Berkeley, CA: Berkeley University Press, 2002.

41
Rochefort et Georges Duval, Le tailleur des bossus, ou l’orthopédie, contrefaçon en 1 acte et en vaudeville, Paris:
J.N. Barba, 1826.
42
Rochefort in Le tailleur, p. 6.

43
While this mannequin is a subject of ridicule, sources like Louise Bury’s 1844 story “L’homme-mannequin” about
a noble but impoverished male fashion model who marries a wealthy Marquess, as well as the story of a “poor
but charming young man” who works as a model in the 1842 story “Le gilet de santé” suggest that there was a
fascination with beautiful men serving as tailor’s models.

44
“Que vois-je sur la chaussée? Des brodequins que se promènent, des cannes qui portent haut la tête en donnant
le bras à des capotes; des bottes marchent crânement le chapeau sur l’oreille: continuation du même système.
Les tailleurs, les chapeliers, les bottiers, les modistes, ont trouvé le moyen de supprimer l’homme qui leur servait
d’enseigne vivante. La réclame s’est simplifée en se perfectionnant.” J.J. Grandville, Un autre monde, Paris: H.
Fournier, 1844, p. 70.

45
K. Marx, Capital, London: Penguin Classics, p. 165.

46
A. Luchet, L’art industriel à l’exposition universelle de 1867, Paris: Librairie Internationale, 1868, p. 379. Luchet
did not come from a wealthy family and knew the industry from the inside — before he became a journalist and
playwright, he worked for a draper in Paris.

47
E. Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, 2nd edition, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
2003, p. 12-3.

48
In 1841, at the age of 23, he published the frst of many editions of his cutting manual and founded the professional
school that is now called ESMOD or the École Supérieure des Arts et Techniques de la Mode, an institution that
currently has branches from Japan to Brazil. In 1847, he patented a fexible metric tape measure that still bears
his name. In order to access historical material on Lavigne, the author took a summer pattern drafting course at
the school, which was still taught based on his principles. In 2011, ESMOD curated an exhibit about his inventions
and the history of the School. The catalogue, by Catherine Örmen, is called Saga de mode, 170 ans d’innovations,
Paris: Esmod Éditions, 2011.

49
Exposition nationale des produits de l’industrie française, n.p. Paris, 1849. Hazel Hahn cites an 1849 vaudeville
called Un déluge d’inventions, revue de l’exposition de l’industrie “in which a mechanical woman is invented as a
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new mannequin.” Lavigne advertised mannequins for tailors, but the vaudeville feminized the bodies on display
at the industrial exhibition. H. Hahn, Scenes of Parisian Modernity: Culture and Consumption in the Nineteenth
Century, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. 115.

50
A. Guillerme, La naissance de l’industrie à Paris: entre sueurs et vapeurs: 1780–1830, Paris: Champ Vallon, 2007.

51
Nicole Parrot, Mannequins, Paris: Éditions Colona, 1981, p. 35.

52
High-end milliners’ boutiques featured heads with faces for displaying hats but they lacked bodies. Jane
Munro has unearthed evidence that a Parisian luxury boutique, “Au Magnifque,” used a life-sized female display
mannequin in the 1770s, and a fxed painted wood version dressed in a robe à la française survives from the 1760s,
but these fgures were rare. Munro, p. 38-9.

Jean-Philippe Worth, A Century of Fashion, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1928, p. 10. and C. Evans, “The
53

Ontology of the Fashion Model,” p. 63.

54
Riotor in Le mannequin, p. 86.

55
See particularly Chapter 1, “Pre-History: Nineteenth-Century Fashion Modelling.” By the early 20th century,
using only a frst name to designate a woman removed her from her family ties and often from the world of
respectability. Actresses like “Polaire” often went by one name, live mannequins entering couture houses like
Paquin were “renamed” with one frst, and often exoticized name, as were prostitutes upon entering a brothel.
Specifc couture dresses were often given feminine frst names like “Mireille.” C. Evans, Mechanical Smile, p. 15.

56
A. Matthews David, “Amazon Chic: Women’s Tailoring in Nineteenth-Century France,” Cutting a Figure:
Tailoring, Technology and Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century Paris, PhD. Dissertation, August 2002, p. 178; J.
Arnold, “Dashing Amazons: the Development of Women’s Dress, c. 1500–1900,” in A. de la Haye and E. Wilson,
eds., Defning Dress: Dress as Object, Meaning and Identity, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999; La
fashion-journal des modes, guide des élégants, n.p. Paris, 1845, p. 523; F. Sourd, La nouvelle grève des tailleurs
de Paris, chez l’auteur, Paris, 1868, p. 11.

For example, the Vicomte de Hédouville compares the amazone to a statue the couturier has cast after nature,
57

while the Baron de Vaux says that the amazone is beauty molded in a dark bodysuit. H. de Pène, in Vicomte de
Hédouville, ed., La femme à cheval, Paris: P. Ollendorff, 1884, p. 5; Baron Charles-Maurice de Vaux, Les femmes
de sport, Paris: C. Marpon et E. Flammarion, 1885, p. 141.

58
W. Aldrich, “The Impact of Fashion on the Cutting Practices for the Woman’s Tailored Jacket, 1800–1927,”
Textile History, vol. 34, no. 2, 2003, p. 137.

59
X. Chaumette, C. Fauque, and E. Montet, Le tailleur, vêtement-message, Paris: Syros-Alternatives, 1992, p. 76;
C. Örmen, Saga de mode, p. 40.

60
G. Bouchet, Le cheval à Paris de 1850–1914, Genève: Librairie Droz S.A., 1993, p. 252.

61
“La mode était à tel point le pivot de ses préoccupations qu’elle avait fait installer aux Tuileries un nombre
considérable de mannequins grandeur nature et habillés de ses toilettes, à seule fn de leur éviter des faux plis.”
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Anny Latour, Les magiciens de la mode, Paris: R. Julliard, 1961, p. 131.

62
Riotor in Le mannequin, p. 94; Örmen, Saga, p. 42.

63
Aldrich in “Cutting Practices,” p. 144. These included Lavigne’s Méthode de coupe pour dames à l’usage des
tailleurs, couturières et apprentis des deux professions, chez l’auteur, Paris, 1868.

64
Örmen, Saga, p. 93.

65
“Ce qui fait la supériorité des couturières parisiennes, c’est que leur outillage ne laisse rien à désirer. Elles ont
toutes une ou plusieurs séries de mannequins depuis la taille la plus petite (38) jusqu’à la taille la plus forte (50)…”
Alice Guerre-Lavigne, L’art dans le costume, Paris, décembre 1885, p. 14; she goes on to describe the sizes, from
38, which can be used for girls over 14 years old or thin young women, to size 50, which is simply called “Taille
forte.” She notes that the size 42 mannequin is the most useful.

66
These sold for the relatively inexpensive price of 16 francs plus 4 francs postage, and a large ad states that the
headquarters for their mannequin business was located at 15, rue de Richelieu, the same locale where her father
opened shop during the Second Empire.

67
In 1894 his catalogue offers female busts in 12 standardized sizes. Bustes et Mannequins F. Stockman, Paris,
Rue Legendre. Stockman continues to manufacture mannequins in a factory in the suburbs of Paris: http://www.
siegel-stockman.com/.
68
G.A. Godillot, “Classe 56 matériel et procédés de la couture et la confection des vêtements,” Exposition
universelle internationale de 1889 à Paris, Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1889, p. 17.

69
Riotor in Le mannequin, p. 96.

70
A. Guerre-Lavigne, L’art dans le costume, Paris, décembre 1885, p. 15.

“Oui, désormais le mannequin est entré dans les moeurs. — ‘J’ai un 42, un 44’ — ce numéro qui indique la demi-
71

mesure du tour de poitrine-dit l’amazone.” Riotor in Le mannequin, p. 78.

S. Sadako Takeda and K. Durland Spilker, Fashioning Fashion: European Dress in Detail 1700–1915, Munich:
72

Delmonico Books, 2010, p. 96.

73
Tissot’s work has received a great deal of critical attention. See T. Garb, “Painting the ‘Parisienne’: James Tissot
and the Making of the Modern Woman,” in K. Lochnan, ed., Seductive Surfaces: The Art of Tissot, New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1999; E. Prelinger, “Tissot as Symbolist and Fetishist? A Surmise,” in K. Lochnan,
ed., Seductive Surfaces: The Art of Tissot, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999; H. Clayson, Painted
Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991, p.
125-6; M. Wentworth, James Tissot, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, p. 154-73.

The images from Tissot’s series were to be accompanied by texts written by different authors. Emile Zola was to
74

write the story that would be paired with Tissot’s Demoiselle. Wentworth in James Tissot, p. 169.
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75
A. Hepp, “Le mannequin,” in Paris tout nu, Paris: E. Dentu, 1885, p. 232-3.

76
J. Coffn, The Politics of Women’s Work: The Paris Garment Trades, 1750–1914, Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1996, p. 202.

77
J. Munro, Silent Partners, p. 176-8.

78
Park, p. 105.

79
“Les fashionables, poupées à ressort, qui boivent, mangent et agissent comme des personnes naturelles. Ces
petites machines, modelées sur le type de la beauté idéale, sont d’une perfection surprenante.…On peut les voir
tous les jours, sans rétribution, de trois à quatre heures, au jardin des Tuileries…Les fashionables se transportent
dans les salons où ils sont désirés.” “Les fashionables, par brevet d’importation et de perfectionnement,” La
Silhouette, Paris: Aubert, 11 février 1830, p. 44.

80
“Il paraît que dans ce pays la mode est de se faire représenter dans les promenades publiques par des Sosies en
plâtre, en bois ou en cire. On fait de l’élégance en effgie. Robes, coiffures, écharpes, diamants, tout ce qui résume
la beauté, le luxe ou la réputation de la personne, est au rendez-vous; elle seule est absente. A quoi bon du reste
la personne? On ne va là que pour voir des habits. C’est en songeant aux solennités de la mode, que le prophète
s’est écrié: Mannequin des mannequins, et tout n’est que mannequin!” Grandville in Un autre monde, p. 70.

81 “Ce qui a tué les froufrous de l’été, sa pimpante allure et sa grâce, et ce qui menace tout entier l’art de la mode,
c’est le Mannequin. Le Mannequin, cette hideuse machine à forme humaine, qui se dresse le long des salles du
Louvre, du Bon Marché, du Printemps, aux devantures au coin des rues, sur les trottoirs, avec sa carcasse grise
bouffe de son, avec un numéro gribouillé à l’encre, à la place de son coeur.” Hepp in “Le mannequin,” p. 231.

82 W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, B. Hanssen, ed., London: Continuum, 2006, p. 106.
83
Schwartz, p. 118. The mannequin serves this role in the writings of Walter Benjamin, the photographs of Eugène
Atget, and as creative muse for the artworks of Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Hans Bellmer, and Marcel Duchamp,
amongst others. For more on the uncanny, the doll, and the mannequin specifcally in relationship to twentieth-
century fashion, see C. Evans, “Deathliness,” Chapter 7 of Fashion at the Edge, New Haven: Yale University Press,
2003, p. 163-88.

As a woman of relatively modest height, I love the fact that a “full-sized” version of double this height (160cm)
84

would represent my actual stature rather than that of the tall, elongated fashion model of today.
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Author Biography

Alison
Matthews David
Toronto Metropolitan University
Dr. Alison Matthews David is an Associate Professor
in the School of Fashion, Toronto Metropolitan
University (formerly Ryerson University).

She was awarded a doctorate from Stanford University,

has published extensively on nineteenth-century dress
and material culture, and co-edits the new open-
access journal Fashion Studies with Dr. Ben Barry. Her
most recent research project, Fashion Victims, looked
at how clothing physically harmed the health of its
makers and wearers by transmitting contagious
disease, leaching chemical toxins, and causing
accidents, including entanglement and fre. The
book was published by Bloomsbury Academic in
2015 and also took the form of a co-curated exhibition
with Senior Curator Elizabeth Semmelhack at the Bata
Shoe Museum in Toronto (June 2014–April 2018). That
research led her to continue her historical sleuthing
and her current book and exhibition project,
Unravelling Crime: A Forensic History of Fashion,
investigates the theme of crime and clothing as
weapon, evidence, and disguise.

Article Citation

Matthews David, Alison. “Body Doubles: The Origins

of the Fashion Mannequin.” Fashion Studies, vol. 1,
no. 1, 2018, pp. 1-46, www.fashionstudies.ca/body-
doubles/, https://doi.org/10.38055/FS010107.
V O LUME 1

Copyright © 2018 Fashion Studies - All Rights Reserved

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license (see:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/)
45