Women studies

Real Women, Normal Curves, and the Making of the American Fashion Mannequin, 1932–1946

Alana Staiti

Configurations, Volume 28, Number 4, Fall 2020, pp. 403-431 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI:

For additional information about this article

[ Access provided at 7 Aug 2021 21:12 GMT from Penn State Univ Libraries ]

https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2020.0029

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/770537

ABSTRACT: In the 1930s, American mannequin designers promoted a realistic style of mannequin modeled from the physical features of fashionably beautiful white women. Lester Gaba, an enterprising mannequin designer, argued that realism in display was needed to counteract the bizarre theatrics of pretentious surrealist-inspired win- dow displays of the 1930s and early 1940s. In this period characterized by anxiety and uncertainty, the glamorous, lifelike mannequin be- came an active participant in American consumer culture. This article contextualizes that phenomenon, claiming that real and ideal bodies were at odds with one another in fashion discourse. Meanwhile, dis- play professionals, fashion practitioners, and the mannequins them- selves played crucial roles in articulating and reinforcing narrow un- derstandings of beauty, while conflating norms and ideals in universal terms.

Upon initial glance at the December 1941 issue of House and Garden, the reader would have come across a seemingly typical overview of the décor in Lester Gaba’s New York apartment. Gaba was an enter- prising window display designer and mannequin maker who had worked hard to establish himself in the world of fashion and visual merchandising, first in Chicago and then in New York. The peculiar thing about the feature, however, was the person giving the tour. It was not Gaba who led readers through the rooms, but rather his mannequin Cynthia who served as stoic hostess. Here in the living room, Cynthia says, “I spend most of my hours.” She continues:

403

Real Women, Normal Curves,

and the Making of the American

Fashion Mannequin, 1932–1946

Alana Staiti Smithsonian Institution

Configurations, 2020, 28:403–31 © 2020 by Johns Hopkins University

Press and the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts.

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I sit at the piano and greet Lester’s friends as they come in. Everyone comes over and speaks to me but I notice that they soon drift away to other parts of the room and become absorbed in conversation. Sometimes I wish I were a brilliant conversationalist as well as a beautiful mannequin, but one can’t be everything, I suppose.1

While the article marveled at Gaba’s taste in décor and ostentatious social life, it also served to promote his popular companion, who unsurprisingly couldn’t sustain a meaningful conversation. Cynthia was a delicately painted papier-mâché mannequin with pale skin, a small tapered nose, high cheekbones, fake eyelashes, and a stylish wig. Figure 1 shows her holding a script and sitting cross-legged next to Gaba, who guest starred on an NBC radio show in 1938. It was an unconventional publicity appearance for a display designer, but Cynthia had opened doors for Gaba, providing him with access to opportunities that might not have been offered before he breathed life into her.

Modeled on a young socialite named Cynthia Wells, about whom we know little except that she modeled clothing at Saks Fifth Av- enue, the mannequin not only embodied but also seemed to enact the skills necessary to socialize with New York’s elite in the 1930s. Gaba had already made a name for himself in the commercial arts before mannequin design. His intricate miniature soap carv- ings adorned advertisements for soap, hosiery, jewelry, and rayon throughout the 1930s. He was neither the first nor the only man- nequin maker to model his creations on society figures, or to imbue his static women with anthropomorphic, lifelike qualities. He was, however, quite well-known for doing so. In his 1952 book, The Art of Window Display, partly a trade publication about the profession and partly a self-indulgent autobiography, Gaba lists the many privileges bestowed upon Cynthia in her short lifetime. Among them, she wore a million-dollar diamond to a ball, inspired a namesake perfume, and starred in a 1938 film with Jack Benny entitled Artists and Models Abroad.2 Cynthia was Gaba’s ticket to high society and stardom for a good four or five years before the US Army drafted him into the fray of World War II, forcing him to leave her behind.

Extant accounts of the Gaba-Cynthia relationship often present Gaba’s activities as totally harebrained or fluke occurrences. To be sure, Gaba’s marketing stunt was unique, and carting Cynthia around town raised many eyebrows. But within the history of mannequin

1. “A Girl Needs a Background,” House and Garden (Dec. 1941), 46–47, 75, 84, at p. 75.

2. Lester Gaba, The Art of Window Display (New York: Studio Publications, Inc., 1952), p. 12.

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production and American consumer culture, we see that Gaba and other mannequin designers intervened in aesthetic debates about fashion and taste that took place during the 1930s and 1940s.

From the early twentieth century, a burgeoning ready-to-wear women’s apparel industry took shape, and while mannequins in store windows across the country promoted the latest fashions, that clothing was not made to fit individual bodies, only approximations of them.3 The ready-to-wear industry ramped up during the Depres- sion, and by the late 1930s, American fashion designers, journal- ists, and home economists were weighing in on the issue of fit. This article argues that the American-made female fashion mannequin played an important but as yet under-acknowledged role in shaping concepts of both real and ideal bodies during the 1930s and 1940s.

3. Claudia B. Kidwell and Margaret C. Christman, Suiting Everyone: The Democratization of Clothing in America (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1974); and Winifred Aldrich, “History of Sizing Systems and Ready-to-Wear Garments,” in Sizing in Clothing: Developing Effective Sizing Systems for Ready-to-Wear Clothing, ed. Susan P. Ashdown (Cambridge: Woodhead Publishing Ltd., 2007), 38–41.

Figure 1. Lester Gaba (right) with his mannequin, Cynthia (left), 1938. Chicago Daily News reprinted in Display World 82.2 (February 1938), p. 22.

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During a period of widespread instability and uncertainty, crucial transformations in the American fashion industry precipitated last- ing implications for the modern, white, aesthetically proportionate female body—its depiction as a uniquely naturalistic form, and its implementation as a universal standard delimiting mass-produced apparel. Through promotional materials professing aspirational and anthropomorphic narratives and through mannequins modeled from recognizable women, or those deemed to embody an “ideal type,” the American fashion mannequin’s identity took shape as an object of intrigue, fascination, and emulation. Anthropometric prac- tices, standardization efforts, and the demand for quick turnarounds in mass-produced fashion perpetuated skewed understandings of the relationship between real and ideal bodies, compelling women to consider their bodies as plastic forms, squeezed into size designa- tions based on normal curves and molded by forces of production that lay out of their control.

By the early 1930s, the hygienic, heterosexual, fertile, slim-yet- softly-curved, young adult white woman’s body was deeply en- trenched in discourses of beauty culture and popular eugenics. His- torians have shown that body types, character types, and personality were linked to health and fitness, feminine beauty, morality, and desirability.4 It is out of this cultural thicket that the uniquely Ameri- can fashion mannequin emerges, and I argue that the provocative, and at times perplexing, treatment of mannequins took on an espe-

4. See, e.g., Isabelle Held, “Designing the Bombshell: Military-Industrial Materials and the Shaping of Women’s Bodies in the USA, 1939–1976,” Ph.D. dissertation, Victoria and Albert Museum and Royal College of Art, London, forthcoming; Christina Cogdell, Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s, Philadelphia (University of Pennsyl- vania Press, 2004); Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998); Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An In- timate History of American Girls (New York: Random House, 1997); Rebecca Arnold, The American Look: Fashion, Sportswear and the Image of Women in 1930s and 1940s New York (London: I.B. Tauris); Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Kerry Soper, “Classical Bodies versus the Criminal Carnival: Eugenics Ideology in 1930s Popular Art,” in Popular Eugenics: Na- tional Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s, Susan Currell and Christina Cogdell, eds. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 269–307; Anna G. Creadick, Per- fectly Average: The Pursuit of Normality in Postwar America (Amherst: University of Mas- sachusetts Press, 2010); and Martin S. Pernick, “Defining the Defective: Eugenics, Aes- thetics, and Mass Culture in Early-Twentieth-Century America,” in The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability, David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, eds. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 89–110. There is more work to be done on historicizing the notion of whiteness as implicit ordinariness in American culture. See, e.g., Julian B. Carter, The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880–1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); and Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997).

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cially charged valence in the United States, when discourses around personality and ideal types informed critiques of taste, and when practices of standardization were applied to the white female figure in ways that reverberate today: first, through characterizations of re- alism in stylized bodies that drew on “ideal” types; second, through the legacy of surrealist store window displays that ushered in a dra- matic, sophisticated, yet rarified quality to visual merchandising; and third, through the outdated and widely divergent clothing size standards that have served as arbitrary benchmarks for the produc- tion of ready-to-wear apparel. Taken together, these phenomena helped shape a quintessentially American fashionable body for mass consumption—a body that reflected dominant beauty standards of the 1930s and early 1940s, whose normal curves persist to this day in residual form through mass-produced apparel.

Most fashion mannequins directly reference fashion cycles, in- cluding popular body shapes and poses, and popular makeup styles. Much of this knowledge pertains to the visual relationship between art, fashion, and the body, primarily gendered feminine.5 For the purposes of displaying dress, mannequin manufacturers strove for anatomical perfection—not to be confused with accuracy—based on stylistic trends in art and perpetuated by fashion cycles. This ensured the contemporary mannequin’s silhouette would fit the ready-to- wear garment being displayed, and vice versa. Historians and soci- ologists have analyzed the mutually constitutive nature of the ide- alized female body and shifts in fashion silhouettes, as well as the influence of visual and performance art and mass media throughout the twentieth century.6 Building on this scholarship, as a historian

5. The late mannequin historian Marsha Bentley Hale made important connections between the ways that expressive gestures and emotive body language conveyed by mannequins aligned with expectations of appropriate behavior for both men and women, and how they changed over time. From her private collection of mannequins, she analyzed several figures made by well-known Western European and American mannequin manufacturers from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Marsha Bentley Hale, “Body Attitudes,” Visual Merchandising & Store Design (Aug. 1983), 47–52; Hale, “Lasting Expressions,” Visual Merchandising & Store Design (Nov. 1985), 45–49. The author wishes to thank Hale for her generosity in sharing her knowledge on the subject. See also Sara K. Schneider, Vital Mummies: Performance Design for the Show- Window Mannequin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); and Schneider, “Body Design, Variable Realisms: The Case of the Female Fashion Mannequin,” Design Issues 13.3 (Autumn 1997), 5–18.

6. Caroline Evans, The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America, 1900–1929 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Marlis Schweitzer, When Broadway Was the Runway: Theater, Fashion, and American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Elizabeth A. Wissinger, This Year’s Model: Fash- ion, Media, and the Making of Glamour (New York: New York University Press, 2015);

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of technology and the body, I pivot to an analysis of mannequins as designed and manufactured forms—as corporeal technologies in their own right. Their material-semiotic significances signal their ex- pressive power, their crucial role in establishing body and beauty standards, their status as active agents of cultural production, and their special, albeit largely unnoticed, place in commerce, art, and American culture.

Mannequins literally embody the modern agenda of industrial- ized production and mass consumption, and, more specifically, the place of the fashion industry in facilitating this agenda. As a designed and manufactured body, the mannequin is akin to that of the fash- ion model, who, in Elizabeth Wissinger’s words, is “institutionalized within ideas and practices shaping fashion, gender, class, hierarchy, and, most important, what a body is and what it is good for.”7 The mannequin that came of age in the 1930s emblematized the plastic- ity of the modern white woman’s body and signaled that there was a place for that woman, and people like her, in the fashion world.

The first section of this article contextualizes mannequin design and production in the early twentieth century, highlighting the restrained, sanitized style of surrealism that adorned department store windows beginning in the 1930s, which caused a stir among American display professionals. The backdrop of the Depression and World War II significantly affected the social worlds of fashion man- nequins, their creators, and the women who admired them, as anxi- ety and self-consciousness permeated public discourse. Mannequin designers created mannequins based on a specific understanding of realism, claiming that their creations, which were inspired by a com- posite form of desirable and realistic features of a variety of women, were a necessary antidote to surrealist-inspired commercial art. The second section analyzes critiques of fashion practitioners that ex- plicitly signaled the dialectical tensions inherent in the burgeoning American fashion industry. These critiques were characterized by increased attention to the problem of fit in ready-to-wear clothing. Home economists had their part in shaping real and ideal bodies, as they advocated for technical sizing standards for sewing patterns and mass-produced womenswear, hoping that a diversity of Ameri- can women would be more satisfied with how off-the-rack clothing fit them.

Ashley Mears, Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); and Elspeth Brown, Work! A Queer History of Modeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).

7. Wissinger, This Year’s Model (above, n. 6), p. 64.

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Display Design, Taste-Making, and Mannequin Manufacture Over the course of the 1930s and 1940s, visual merchandisers and advertisers across the United States tried to strike a balance between the inaccessible and seemingly elitist commercial art inspired by avant-garde artists (many of whom had emigrated from Europe) and the more naturalistic, romanticized interpretations that they claimed American middle-class consumers favored. The store window dis- play needed to appeal to a wide swath of the population, any kind of passerby, but specifically the middle-class female consumer, who was assumed to be white.8 Mannequin designers, visual merchandis- ers, and advertisers tried to incorporate characteristics of both ordi- nary and extraordinary women into their work to help cultivate a distinctly American glamour and bodily style to which consumers could aspire. The use of mannequins by surrealist artists was a sign of subversion and protest, but in the hands of display designers armed with realistic mannequins and the latest merchandise, what would or could have been a critique of narcissism and consumer passiv- ity became perplexing juxtapositions of mannequins and props for shock value.

As the American display world gained professional status in the first few decades of the twentieth century,9 it drew on the expertise of practitioners and tastemakers, including merchandisers, theater de- signers, art directors, gallery owners, and museum curators, though it was not simply in department stores that a revolution in display was taking place. The influence of showmanship and spectacle at

8. For analyses of (primarily white) women and consumption of fashion and beauty in early twentieth-century US, see, e.g., Lears, Fables of Abundance (above, n. 4); Peiss, Hope in a Jar (above, n. 4); Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Colum- bia University Press, 1999); Regina Lee Blaszczyk, “Cinderella Stories: The Glass of Fash- ion and the Gendered Marketplace,” in His and Hers: Gender, Consumption, and Technol- ogy, Roger Horowitz and Arwen Mohun, eds. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 139–64; and Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Manag- ers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986). For a critical race studies approach, see, e.g., Elspeth H. Brown, “Black Models and the Invention of the US ‘Negro Market,’” in Work! (above, n. 6), 163–209; Maxine Leeds Craig, Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty and the Poli- tics of Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Robert E. Weems, Jr., “Con- sumerism and the Construction of Black Female Identity in Twentieth-Century Amer- ica,” in The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader, ed. Jennifer Scanlon (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 166–78.

9. See, e.g., William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New Amer- ican Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 59–63; Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imi- tation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); and Schneider, Vital Mummies (above, n. 5), 7–31.

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world’s fairs and in museums informed the stylistic expectations of display in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And yet, as a uniquely American display world took shape, many still looked to Paris as the arbiter of style. This is important to note when considering taste-making imperatives in art, design, and fashion in the United States during this period, a point I’ll return to shortly. Promoting a quintessentially “American” form of display design co- incided with broader taste-making trends among influential fashion practitioners. A sense of patriotism and self-sufficiency permeated Depression-era commerce that continued into World War II. Fash- ion tastemakers, including Lord & Taylor executive Dorothy Shaver, initiated several successful campaigns to promote American manu- facturers and designers, jump-starting the American high-fashion in- dustry, an interest in sportswear, and the notion that active lifestyles and active bodies were fashionable and desirable.10

In the realm of mannequin design and manufacture through the 1920s, various mannequin styles populated store windows, in- cluding hand-sculpted wax forms that appeared uncannily realistic. Other display tools included wooden or wire dress forms, painted papier-mâché figures, and sleek, art deco–style mannequins made of durable imitation wax that became popular after their debut at the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris. In general, many of the higher-end forms were made in France, Austria, and Germany, and these companies altered the measurements of their mannequins to suit American women’s body types, which were distinct from “those of the Continent” in that they appeared slightly more athletic.11 Additionally, mid-range forms based in the United States and Europe supplied American stores in the early twentieth century.12

10. Arnold, The American Look (above, n. 4).

11. “Model Women,” Fortune (Aug 1930), 89–91, at p. 90. See also Parrot, Mannequins (New York: St. Martins Press, 1982); and Anne O’Brien and Warner Olivier, “The Lady in the Window,” Saturday Evening Post (July 20, 1946), p. 27.

12. The trade journals Merchant’s Record (later Merchants Record and Show Window) and Display World featured advertisements for a variety of display figures and fixtures made in the United States and Europe. Picture books about mannequins that have been pub- lished since the 1950s reveal displays and mannequins from high-end department stores. See, e.g., Robert J. Leydenfrost, Window Display (New York: Architectural Book Publishing Co., Inc., 1950); Lester Gaba, The Art of Window Display (New York: Studio Publications, Inc., 1952); Leonard S. Marcus, The American Store Window (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1978); Parrot, Mannequins (above, n. 11); and Barry James Wood, Show Windows: 75 Years of the Art of Display (New York: Congdon & Weed, Inc., 1982). I have also consulted manuscript and photographic collections of window dis- plays at the Hagley Museum and Library, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the

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Creating lifelike forms from wax was, and continues to be, a labor- intensive process. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu- ries, a workshop could include several skilled workers, whose tasks ranged from pouring hot wax into molds, to implanting hairs one by one, to fixing enamel eyes into fresh wax heads.13 The process began with an artist who sculpted from a living model a clay fig- ure that was then cast in plaster molds. The molding process has not changed drastically since then, although it has become more streamlined; some sculptors use photographs instead of live models to create the clay original, while manufacturers transitioned from plaster, papier-mâché, and plastic forms in the 1930s and 1940s to more durable fiberglass in the mid 1950s.14

Ironically, despite mannequins often standing in for symbols of standardization, mass production, and mass consumption in the fashion industry, their manufacturers often employed (and still do employ) batch production methods, rather than mass production, to accommodate diverse and shifting demands based on the whims of the market.15 Through clay sculpting, mold casting, and other craft techniques, many foundational aspects of mannequin production have largely remained the same over the past century or so, while the materials used to manufacture the forms have evolved according to affordable options and desired visual effects for the given peri- od.16 Mannequins are fascinating technologies for this very reason. As merchandising tools, they visually communicate dress and style and exude a particular aura surrounding the goods. But as artists, writers, designers, and filmmakers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have shown, the semiotic possibilities of man- nequins as mimetic devices make them potent tools in critiques of mass production and the human body’s relationship to mechani-

Free Library of Philadelphia, the National Museum of American History, and the Spe- cial Collections of the Fashion Institute of Technology.

13. Parrot, Mannequins (above, n. 11), 50–51.

14. Marsha Bentley Hale, “Future Mannequins: Past & Present Tense,” Retail Attraction 9 (March/April 1986), 39–43.

15. Philip Scranton, Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865–1925 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 11. The author wishes to thank David Suisman for his guidance in articulating this point.

16. Contemporary mannequin manufacturers predominantly use fiberglass and rein- forced plastics to generate their finished products. In keeping with global trends in manufacturing, factories producing low-end, mid-range, and some high-end manne- quins have predictably moved from Europe and the United States to parts of Asia and South America.

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zation and technology.17 For instance, surrealist artists considered mannequins pregnant with symbolic potential. At once representa- tive of human-mimetic technology, mechanization, eroticism, and memento mori, mannequins were appropriated by surrealist artists, primarily men, in artworks that verged on the grotesque, or at the very least elicited unsettling reactions, while claiming to represent subconscious memories, dreams, and desires.18 While not explicitly borrowing from surrealist visual cues, Cynthia’s weirdly magnetic appeal offered a surreal experience to onlookers beyond the store window.

Between 1931 and 1936, surrealist exhibitions in the greater New York region introduced audiences to the art movement.19 Commer- cial artists, including advertisers, illustrators, and visual merchan- disers, promptly adopted the surrealist craze in their work,20 which was also reflected in high fashion, most notably the work of Italian-

17. Schneider, Vital Mummies, and “Body Design, Variable Realisms” (above, n. 5); and Caroline Evans, “The Ontology of the Fashion Model,” AA Files, Architectural Associa- tion Publications 63 (2011), 56–69.

18. For treatment of surrealism and the female body, see, e.g., Mary Ann Caws, “Ladies Shot and Painted: Female Embodiment in Surrealist Art,” in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf Kuenzli, and Gwen Raaberg, eds., Surrealism and Women (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston, L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985); and Jennifer Mundy, ed., Surrealism: Desire Unbound (London: Tate Publishing, 2001).

19. Ingrid Schaffner and Lisa Jacobs, eds., Julien Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery (Cam- bridge: MIT Press, 1998).

20. An oft-cited article from the period is Frank Caspers, “Surrealism in Overalls,” Scrib- ner’s 104 (August 1938), 17–21. See also “Background to Fashion: Surrealism in Fashion Advertising,” Art & Industry 32 (Feb. 1942), 45–47. For more on the influence of surreal- ism in fashion and American commercial art, see Dilys E. Blum, Shocking! The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2003); Richard Martin, Fashion and Surrealism (New York: Rizzoli, 1987); Jennifer Rose Cohen, “Surreal- ism and the Art of Consumption,” Ph.D. dissertation (University of Chicago, 2017); Sandra Zalman, Consuming Surrealism in American Culture: Dissident Modernism (Surrey: Ashgate, 2015); Zalman, “‘A Way of Life’: The Museum of Modern Art and the Market- place for Surrealism,” Dada and Surrealism: Transatlantic Aliens on American Shores, 1914–1945, 14 (2018), https://scalar.usc.edu/works/the-space-between-literature-and- culture-1914-1945/vol14_2018_zalman; Keith L. Eggener, “‘An Amusing Lack of Logic:’ Surrealism and Popular Entertainment,” American Art 7.4 (Autumn 1993), 30–45; Han- nah Crawforth, “Surrealism and the Fashion Magazine,” American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism 14.2 (2004), 212–46; and Dickran Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde, 1920–1950 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995).

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born designer Elsa Schiaparelli, who practiced in Paris and New York. Department stores in urban centers throughout the United States staged surrealist-inspired windows, theatrically suspending manne- quin limbs in space or using body parts to prop up merchandise and create dreamworld scenes featuring odd juxtapositions of man- nequins, clothing, and other objects. The longevity of the trend sur- prised some display designers, including Gaba, who eagerly awaited the demise of the craze.21 In New York, the artists themselves, most notably Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, and Marcel Vertès,22 occasion- ally assumed the role of window dresser, arranging mannequins and props into otherworldly dreamscapes that baffled spectators and drew crowds, and prompted repudiation from the more “purist” of the avant-garde surrealists like André Breton. Despite the swift com- mercialization of the art form, commentators have recounted that the intentions of the artists did not always neatly translate when they collaborated with folks in fashion commerce. For example, in 1936 Salvador Dalí designed a series of windows and print adver- tisements for Bonwit Teller, but the department store editorialized certain features, including replacing an outdated mannequin with a newer one “in a tailored suit.”23 Dalí claimed that the alteration had “ruined all meaning,”24 and therefore, as Jennifer Rose Cohen notes, “management had removed key representations of surrealist creativ- ity, dreaming and the out-of-style.”25

Surrealist-inspired displays in the United States certainly turned heads, and some display directors claimed that they boosted sales,26 but surrealist art in general generated mixed reviews, and commen- tators were quick to assert that no one understood surrealism to be- gin with. A 1936 article in Women’s Wear Daily described surrealism as a perplexing artistic movement, pinpointing Schiaparelli as the

21. Virginia Roehl, “‘Surrealist’ Windows at Bonwit Teller’s,” Merchants Record and Show Window 80:1 (Jan. 1937), p. 16; Elizabeth Schlesinger, “Fantastic Display Treatment Stops More Passersby,” Display World 33.1 (July 1938), p. 10; and “Surrealism Influence Still Manifest,” Display World 32.4 (April 1938), 3, 38–40; “Surrealism in Avenue Win- dows,” Women’s Wear Daily (July 1, 1943), p. 3.

22. Gaba, The Art of Window Display (above, n. 2), p. 17. Vertes created illustrations for Schiaparelli’s print advertisements for her popular perfume, “Shocking.”

23. Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), quoted in Cohen, “Surrealism and the Art of Consumption,” (above, n. 20), p. 128.

24. Ibid.

25. Cohen, “Surrealism and the Art of Consumption,” (above, n. 20), p. 128.

26. I have not found empirical evidence to verify that these sorts of displays impacted sales.

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instigator of the surrealist trend in fashion. The art movement was furthered by the publicity frenzy surrounding the 1936 Surrealism and Dada exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art:

Ever since Schiaparelli admitted the Surrealistic touch in some of her designs last year, the fashion world has been trying to get a better understanding of just what Surrealism is. All efforts at explanation, including those of men and women who are considered best qualified to explain, have only succeeded in being more mystifying. It is no wonder then that designers and all other inter- ested in “being prepared” for influences that have commercial possibilities for fashion, are flocking to the Modern Museum of Art where an exhibit of 700 examples of surrealistic art is to be seen. . . . While all the definitions continue to lead the inquirer farther afield in coping with the thought behind this movement, the effect to the layman is one of a determined effort on the part of the artists to rebel against conventional forms and composition, even to the point of achieving confusion, burlesque and frequently repugnance on the canvas.27

A critique of mass production and the human body’s relationship to it, the art form was partly aimed at eliciting discomfort or even “re- pugnance” in the spectator. And yet, as surrealism was one of many visual languages taken up by avant-garde artists, culture fiends of New York found its mystique difficult to resist.

Importantly though, the inclusion of motifs and design fea- tures initially described as surrealist were adapted in “restrained and simplified”28 ways to suit the tastes of local audiences. By the late 1940s, surrealist window displays lost most of their original associa- tion with psychoanalysis and subversion, instead aligning with mar- ketable qualifiers like “fantasy”29 and “spine-tickling sophistication.”30 The trend toward sanitized and simplified surrealism originated in the early 1930s through a conscious effort by gallery owner Julien Levy, who offered European and American expatriate surrealist art- ists a platform to show their work, albeit divorced from the political underpinnings of surrealism’s politics. Keith Eggener explains:

27. “The Realists View the Surrealists,” Women’s Wear Daily (Dec. 14, 1936), p. 2.

28. “Surrealism in Kansas City,” Women’s Wear Daily (April 18, 1939), p. 19. See also Russell C. Kehrt’s article about his experiences appealing to the local Cincinnati, Ohio, clientele at the clothing store Jenny’s. Russell C. Kehrt, “The Public Gives Us Our Cue,” Display World (July 1939), p. 12; and the application of sanitized surrealism in Tulsa, Oklahoma: “Modified Surrealism,” Display World (Oct. 1939), p. 26.

29. “Fantasy is Returning to Display: Lee,” Women’s Wear Daily (Nov. 18, 1958), p. 16.

30. “Surrealism in Avenue Windows,” Women’s Wear Daily (July 1, 1943), p. 3.

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For most American authors, Surrealism did not mean revolution, either psy- chic or social. Little mention was made of the movement’s agenda or political sympathies . . . Museum directors and gallery owners, people with an invest- ment in the art, were producing much of the earliest American copy on Sur- realism, and during the politically fractious 1930s they may have thought it economically prudent to cast the movement in relatively non-threatening terms. As New York gallery owner and art promoter Julien Levy later explained, Surrealism needed to be altered if it was to be welcomed and bought by Amer- ican audiences.31

In brief, the surrealist presence in America was hardly ever meant to serve its revelatory ends. It was instead an experience framed from the start in commercial and art market terms, tightly imbricated with members of American high society, wealthy heiresses, and arbiters of aristocratic taste.32 To that end, mannequins could have been de- ployed in window displays to carry out the subversive goal of awak- ening spectators from their dreamlike states of passivity, but instead were deployed as sirens, drawing passersby further into the dream- world of mass culture and consumerism.33

If American window-display designers were to adopt sanitized sur- realist motifs, they would need to be packaged in a way that was still inviting and intriguing to passersby rather than offensive or repug- nant. The mannequins themselves needed to appear more accessible and typically American in nature. To that end, mannequins in the French surrealist and American realist traditions appeared distinct from each other. Towering abstract papier-mâché mannequins and wicker forms symbolized the French approach to displaying high fashion à la surrealism. At the 1937 Paris Exposition’s Pavillon de l’Elégance, seven-foot-tall plaster mannequins painted “pinkish beige” were included in a French high-fashion exhibition.34 De- signed by Robert Couturier and manufactured by mannequin maker Siégel (who popularized the French art deco–style mannequin a de- cade prior), these mannequins often served as counterpoint to the

31. Eggener, “‘An Amusing Lack of Logic,’” (above, n. 20), p. 33.

32. “Mad ‘Dream Betrayal’ of New York Society at the Astounding Party to its Newest Idol,” Sunday Mirror Magazine (Feb. 24, 1935), 10–11, Julien Levy Papers, Box 10, Phila- delphia Museum of Art.

33. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991); and Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,’ and Other Writings on Media, 2nd ed., eds. Michael W. Jen- nings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin; trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Living- stone, Howard Eiland, et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008).

34. Blum, Shocking! (above, n. 20), p. 112.

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American realist approach. A two-page feature in American Vogue that same year observed the divergent forms of contemporary man- nequins: “By now, the trail has forked, one road leading to an Ameri- can photograph realism in plaster or Cellophane; the other fork lead- ing to the seven-foot plaster abstractions of Paris.”35

The playful tone of surrealist-inspired window displays repre- sented tasteful and appropriate adaptations of otherwise grotesque imagery, especially that which depicted women’s bodies or their body parts. While displaying body parts—legs to advertise stockings, feet to highlight shoes, or heads to display millinery—was nothing new to window display, the surrealist influence recontextualized their aesthetic function.36 For example, at Bonwit Teller in Philadel- phia, surrealist window displays featured naturalistic mannequins paired with preposterous props. One such example included an over- size cigarette jutting out of a reproduction “Mae West Lips” couch (the original was designed by Salvador Dalí), and an oversize nose hovering in the background.37 The tone of the display was comical and absurd. It probably did not offend any passersby, as graceful mannequins in dresses and furs adorned the display; yet, it served as an explicit nod to Dalí’s iconic couch and the tasteful reinterpreta- tion of surrealist motifs.

Similarly, tasteful reinterpretations of otherwise grotesque or unsettling motifs abounded in popular visual culture. It would be difficult to ignore the impact of the Depression on these stylistic trends; as Warren Susman observes, “An overwhelming sense of shame . . . seems to have engulfed so many of those middle-class Americans affected by the impact of the Depression—a shame felt by those who by no means starved but now found their accustomed way of life altered.”38 These sorts of feelings were channeled through a variety of visual, literary, and moving-image forms. Susman uses the example of Walt Disney to make this point: “Disney . . . seemed to know precisely how to take American fears and humiliations and transform them in acceptable ways so Americans could live with

35. “The Evolution of a Mannequin,” Vogue 90.8 (Oct. 15, 1937), 100–101. Surrealist mannequins in Couturier’s style were copied by American mannequin designers, most notably James David Buckley. See, e.g., the cover of March 1938 Display World; “Sur- realism Influence Still Manifest” (above, n. 21); and “Store-Window Displays Attract First-Night Enthusiasts,” Life (March 28, 1938), 29–30.

36. Schneider, Vital Mummies (above, n. 5), 12–17.

37. “Bonwit Teller Surrealist Window,” photograph, March 1, 1938, Philadelphia Re- cord Photograph Morgue, Historical Society of Philadelphia.

38. Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 194.

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them. . . . Disney provided a way to transform our most grotesque nightmares into fairy tales and pleasant dreams.”39 Because most Americans did not have the opportunity to be exposed to the “gro- tesque nightmares” that surrealist artists had envisioned for revela- tory purposes, spectators received a sanitized, depoliticized version of surrealism from its introduction in the United States. Meanwhile, American mannequin designers who strove for realism and individ- uality in their creations claimed that perplexing surrealist displays hindered the accessible and straightforward communication of fash- ion for local audiences.

In a May 1946 issue of Women’s Wear Daily, Lester Gaba described display trends of the recent past, building a case for the importance of the display designer to a store’s merchandising department. It was one of his many efforts over the course of his career to elevate the profession of the display designer from that of a trade to an art form. He lamented the fact that display designers were just as susceptible to the frivolous whims of fashion trends as the typical female consumer, arguing for unpretentious display practice, lest the display man get carried away with his artistic expression and super- ficial sense of loftiness. “There is an unhappy trend,” stated Gaba, “toward unnatural and abstract chi-chi which could easily result in an era of lifted-pinkies in window-display techniques.”40 Cautioning against pretentiousness, Gaba argued, here and in many other of his monthly columns titled “Lester Gaba Looks at Display,” that the visual merchandiser had a duty to the store for which he worked, as well as the local community to which his displays should appeal. He ended the article with one last pitch to the display designer: “He should try to remember that a large percentage of his audience are average people who never heard of Baroque, and, even if they had, wouldn’t like it.”41

Gaba had had enough of the over-the-top department store dis- plays that drew on surrealist motifs because, he claimed, they did not suit mainstream tastes. In the same article mentioned above, Gaba tore into surrealist-inspired window displays:

39. Ibid., p. 196.

40. Lester Gaba, “Lester Gaba Looks at Display,” Women’s Wear Daily (May 13, 1946), p. 34. Other display designers echoed similar concerns. See, e.g., Ray W. Parks, “Display Trends for 1938,” Merchants Record and Show Window 82.1 (Jan. 1938), p. 5.

41. Gaba (above, n. 40). Gaba had cautioned against this sort of unrestrained artistic zeal in window design on more than one occasion. See also Lester Gaba, “Window Display Trends,” Women’s Wear Daily (Sept. 9, 1937), p. 20.

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It is not so long ago that an entire country of windows went mad in another direction. Surrealism raised its ugly head, and received its first burst of public- ity. . . . A few intelligent designers used the technique to advantage, but in the hands of amateurs, of which there was a majority (to put it conservatively), a school of horror developed which set window-display back years. Instead of merchandise, bathtubs full of roses and bleached steer-skulls decorated the best windows.42

The bathtubs and steer-skulls were meant as a jab to display design- ers who imitated Dalí’s aforementioned incident at Bonwit Teller in New York. Gaba insisted on a reality check for display designers, denouncing the frivolous approach to window display that he con- strued as superciliousness and being out of touch with one’s audi- ence.

If American mannequin designers reclaimed realism in the 1930s, what did that realism look like? Wax figures from previous decades had certainly appeared uncannily realistic, often compelling pass- ersby to second-guess whether the figure was alive or artificial. So, what made these new, modern papier-mâché figures “realistic” and desirable, according to contemporary standards?

Prominent mannequin designers of the 1930s and 1940s, includ- ing Lester Gaba, Lillian Greneker, Cora Scovil, Jean Spadea, and Mary Brosnan, modeled mannequin features from a combination of figures and faces, some from recognizable people like Hollywood actresses, and usually including real human hair.43 Gaba claimed that the “psy- chology” behind the composite technique of realism “is that a wom- an’s ideal is composed of features she admires in other women—and when she looks at a dress in a window, she sees herself in that dress, looking like her ideal of beauty.”44 For his group of mannequins for the 1933–1934 season at B. Altman & Co., the “individualized” characteristics were “varied as to height, complexion tone, and pro- portions,” and their attitudes “naturalistic and diversified.”45 More specifically, his creations were described in the following terms: “ac- tive in silhouette and with piquant, tip-nosed little faces suggestive of the modern girl. Their make-up is done by a new oil paint which

42. Gaba, “Lester Gaba Looks at Display” (above, n. 40).

43. “The ‘One Woman’ at Saks,” Merchant’s Record and Show Window 80.5 (May 1937), p. 7; “Distinct Trend Toward Better Mannequins,” Merchants Record and Show Window 82.3 (March 1938), p. 7.

44. “Modern de Milo,” Women’s Wear Daily (March 5, 1937), p. 3.

45. “B. Altman & Co. Introduces Naturalistic Gaba Mannequins Prior to Public Show- ing,” Women’s Wear Daily (April 13, 1934), p. 5.

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is worked to suggest a natural looking skin texture.”46 This language signaled not only dominant understandings of modern youthful- ness and beauty, but also the physical characteristics of small facial features and pale skin as “natural” and attractive.47 Variety in ap- pearance manifested in narrow terms, as glamour and chicness only applied to elite white women who were, in the words of a fashion journalist, “well-bred and intelligent.”48

The visual variety that mannequin designers espoused material- ized in terms of age and facial features of white women. A 1938 article spelled out Gaba’s sources of inspiration, framing them in contradistinction to the trend toward “bizarre” eccentricity in win- dow display:

The mannequins . . . [capture] the facial similarities of women today, in the sense that fashionable women and girls are not necessarily all glamour girls, and doll faces, and that there are women who at 40 or 50 buy fashionable clothes, and also, that all feminine figures are not limited to size 12. . . . This venture into realism is particularly significant now when the wave of “imagi- native display” is at its height, and when store windows have become specta- cles of eccentric staging, to the point that merchandise is submerged as some- thing incidental in the carnival of bizarre and confusing “props” and lighting.49

Now more than ever, the editors argued, variety in bodily form and character would be needed to counteract distracting display. While variety in form and character—a democratization of representation, so to speak—had been considered an important characteristic of artistic and literary realism since the late nineteenth century,50 its deployment in this case signaled the veritable opposite approach. Realism in the way display professionals used the term signaled the stylization of select desirable physical traits. They couched this method in democratizing terms, promoting the fact that a combina- tion of characteristics from a variety of women went into making realistic mannequins, but the mannequins they created were no or- dinary folk, and they certainly reinforced dominant constructions of whiteness and femininity.

46. “Group of Mannequins by Gaba Presented by Best & Co. at Tea,” Women’s Wear Daily (Oct. 2, 1933), p. 4.

47. Carter, Heart of Whiteness (above, n. 4).

48. “Saks Fifth Avenue New Display Mannequins Assert Realism in Figure Type and Size,” Women’s Wear Daily (Oct. 3, 1938), p. 4.

49. Ibid.

50. Orvell, The Real Thing (above, n. 9).

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In the 1930s and 1940s there were indeed attempts to include more diverse physical features in both mannequin design and print advertising, but businesspeople claimed that demand was lacking.51 One such underrepresented market included Black consumers, and in the late 1930s, Lester Gaba tried in some small way to fulfill that demand in Harlem. A 1980 piece in the New York Times erroneously claimed that the first Black mannequins were introduced only twelve years prior, in 1968 by British mannequin manufacturer Adel Root- stein. Gaba rectified the assertion in a letter to the editor. He insisted:

I created the first group of black window mannequins in 1938 for a ladies’ fashion store, Blumstein’s . . . [in] Harlem, whose owner had complained to me that there were no real Negro type mannequins available. At that time there was no demand for a black mannequin, and display manufacturers sim- ply sprayed white mannequins brown or tan when required. My figures had black features.52

Unfortunately, Gaba did not make clear what he meant by “Negro type” or “black features,” and I have yet to find any promotional ma- terial specific to Gaba’s Black mannequins, but the reader can assume that these plaster bodies looked different from Gaba’s more well- known pale-skinned mannequins. Although it is nearly impossible to verify whether Gaba did in fact create the first Black mannequin, or whether there was, as he indicates, “no demand for a black man- nequin” (which is doubtful), it is clear that mainstream mannequin manufacturers considered the physical features of people of color an afterthought, if they considered them at all.53

If we recall Cynthia’s special status as a society woman, we see that Gaba might have been interested in presenting a hoity-toity air, an aura of unapproachability in her demeanor, a reinforcement of con-

51. Susannah Walker, Style and Status: Selling Beauty to African American Women, 1920– 1975 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 88–89. For historical treatment of white-owned cosmetic companies’ attempts to cater to Black consumers, as well as Black-owned cosmetics manufacturers in the early twentieth century, see Peiss, Hope in a Jar (above, n. 4), 108–14. For post-war mobilization of the Black beauty industry, see Brown, “Black Models,” (above, n. 8).

52. Lester Gaba, “Black Mannequins,” New York Times (Dec. 17, 1980), p. C8.

53. Questions of phenotypic representation and physical variety cut deeper than “types” and “features,” though. As writer Nella Larsen illustrated in her 1929 novel Passing, part of racial formation involves performative acts. If a light-skinned African American or biracial person could perform whiteness in a space deemed unsafe or inap- propriate for a Black person to inhabit, they could pass for white and be granted privi- leges which they would have otherwise been denied.

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servative femininity and demonstration of good taste. Fashion his- torian Rebecca Arnold notes of feminine expectations for the period:

This conventional gender construction was seen by some as offering an ap- propriate balm for the uncertainties of the period. Women were, from their early teens, guided to view femininity as something artificial, to be con- structed through grooming and adornment, and to be scrupulously vigilant of respectable notions of acceptable taste.54

If this is the kind of realism that Gaba was going for, we might view his outspoken standpoint as a form of self-preservation, not only to ensure that the display designer’s job remained relevant, but also to protect his private life. As a gay man working in the fashion world, he was already in a vulnerable position due to the threat of homophobic ridicule and routine acts of violence toward LGBTQT+ people.55 It is not far-fetched to argue that while Cynthia-around-town amounted to an elaborate marketing stunt, her tasteful yet artificially feminine demeanor served as Gaba’s “beard,” or female companion meant to mask his sexuality and provide heteronormative cover. I would ask the reader to pause to consider the ultimate surrealistic irony here: a gay man as puppeteer of a synthetic woman, who herself serves as an arbiter of style and taste for real women, implicitly guiding them on how to be feminine, and hence, artificial.

Other designers aside from Gaba proposed interesting technical methods to achieve mannequin realism. In 1940, the mannequin designer Lillian Greneker was granted a patent (one of many in her name) for a method of adhering photographic images printed on pli- able film to a translucent plastic mannequin. Greneker’s recommen- dation for this novel form involved using images of facial and other bodily features to create “a three-dimensional likeness of a known person . . . generally a popular actor or actress, or a similar noted personage, whose features are chosen for reproduction.”56 Working with a standard mold, the individuality of the mannequin would be communicated not through careful sculpting and painted-on fea- tures, but instead through the two-dimensional likeness of someone

54. Arnold, The American Look (above, n. 4), p. 81.

55. “Fashion is a Fairy,” Esquire 10 (April 1938), 35–37, 116; George Chauncey, “The Forgotten History of Gay Entrapment,” Atlantic (June 25, 2019), https://www.theatlan- tic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/before-stonewall-biggest-threat-was-entrap- ment/590536/; and Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994).

56. Lillian L. Greneker, Display Device and Method of Making the Same, Patent number 2,309,447, Jan. 26, 1943, United States.

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superimposed on a contoured form. Similarly, Cora Scovil, another successful mannequin and furniture designer, was an early adopter of plastic, cellophane, and Lucite as building materials. Her translu- cent mannequins were featured in New York fashion shows, includ- ing the World of Fashion Building at the 1939 world’s fair.57 Futur- istic in their characterization, Scovil’s mannequins, made of both plastic and plaster, received ample press in the late 1930s and 1940s. Taking liberties with what counted as realism in mannequin design, Greneker, Gaba, and Scovil set the standard for promoting idealized forms inspired by “real women,” often while experimenting with novel building materials.

Again, naturalistic mannequins were modeled from professional fashion models, Hollywood actresses, and socialites. The likenesses of actresses including Greta Garbo, Rosalind Russell, and Joan Craw- ford served as inspiration for realistic mannequins, offering not only a recognizable face in the store window, but also an aspirational quality to the consumer experience.58 Roland Marchand explains the reason behind the aspirational tone: “People had never been so eager to enjoy vicarious experiences of the life of the wealthy. The movies alone proved this conclusively. Moreover, women in particular had never surrendered their ambitions, despite hard times.”59 Advertise- ments featured aristocrats and Hollywood celebrities as exemplars to which middle-class consumers could aspire. They also related the self-confident, glamorous woman to a made-up one.60

Even if the model was not recognizable to the public, coverage in popular magazines directed readers’ attention to the uncannily beautiful characteristics of realistic mannequins. By latching on to the curious trope of the uncanny double, journalists featured light- hearted snippets that dared the reader to tell apart the model from the mannequin. Not only that, the reader learned specific informa- tion about ideal types. A 1939 issue of Life featured twenty-year-old

57. Kathleen McLaughlin, “Thrust Into a Scrapbag Yields Business With a Payroll of 138,” New York Times (Dec. 31, 1939), p. 26; Virginia Pope, “World of Fashion Will Open at Fair,” New York Times (June 1, 1940), p. 18; and “Gowns are Shown by ‘Ersatz’ Models,” New York Times (July 9, 1941), p. 17.

58. Parrot, Mannequins (above, n. 11), p. 139; Gayle Strege, “The Store Mannequin: An Evolving Ideal of Beauty,” in Visual Merchandising: The Image of Selling, ed. Louisa Iar- occi (Surrey: Ashgate), 104–105; and Emily R. Klug, “Allure of the Silent Beauties: Man- nequins and Display in America, 1935–1970,” in The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800– 2007, ed. John Potvin (New York: Routledge, 2009), 200–13.

59. Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920– 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press), p. 292.

60. Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar (above, n. 4).

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Ann Reid Hutchinson, recently graduated from the Models Preferred School in New York, next to a mannequin designed by Jean Spadea, clad in the same dress, in the spitting image of Hutchinson. Hutchin- son was selected from her graduating class as “the perfect example of the new ladylike fashion ideal of 1939,” because of her “finely chiseled features, soft feminine shoulders, a rounded 34-in. bust, a slim 25-in. waist, and generous 36-in. hips.”61 In both explicit and implicit ways, ideal physical features of women deemed fashionably beautiful were communicated to interested readers.

While mannequins had always been modeled after real women, what made them exceptional in the 1930s was that they also had personalities and demeanors. Imbuing mannequins with unique personalities lent them an anthropomorphic quality and brought them to life for readers of not only popular magazines but also mer- chandising trade publications, where, for instance, a journalist re- ported on Cynthia’s birthday celebration in deadpan fashion.62 Ar- ticles in popular magazines, including Life, House and Garden, and the Saturday Evening Post, contributed to narratives that highlighted the personalities of American-made mannequins and their “casual, bored expression[s],”63 often relying on a gossipy, narcissistic tone to emphasize their fashion-fickleness, or playing on modesty when a display designer undressed them in the window for all passersby to see.64 Promotional material for Gaba’s 1938 line of mannequins, called “Talking Back,” included photographs of each clothed man- nequin in a series of poses with the captions, “She Shops,” “She Stops to Smoke,” and “She Looks in the Mirror.”65 The anthropomorphized characterizations implied that these mannequins counted as women in the world—they went shopping, they smoked cigarettes, they gazed at themselves in the mirror. The first-person narrative assigned to Cynthia, as well as the promotional captions for the Gaba Girls’ “Talking Back” line, exhibited anthropomorphic qualities, includ- ing the mimicry of “feminine” activities and attentiveness to one’s

61. “Life Model and Her Dummy Double Defy Public to Tell Them Apart,” Life (Feb. 13, 1939), p. 66. See also “Shapely Model is Cast in Plaster to Make a Master Manikin Mold,” Life (March 3, 1941), 58, 60.

62. “Happy Birthday, Cynthia!” Women’s Wear Daily (August 16, 1938), p. 3.

63. “Model on Fifth Avenue,” Life (July 12, 1937), p. 33.

64. Anne O’Brien and Warner Olivier, “The Lady in the Window,” Saturday Evening Post (July 20, 1946), 26–27, 85–86; Cora Scovil, “It’s a Break for Everybody,” in Cora Scovil’s Lady’s Book, ed. Baird Leonard (New York: Harrison-Hilton Books, Inc., 1940), 120–21.

65. “She Shops,” “She Stops to Smoke,” “She Looks in the Mirror,” photographs, 1938, John Wanamaker Collection, Box 50, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

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own self-fashioning—the hallmark of a society woman, a true social performer.

Display designers lamented, or at the very least were perplexed by, the inaccessible tone imbued in the surrealist craze in commercial art sweeping the country, the most vocal critiques of which came from Lester Gaba. Mannequin realism was one way to counteract the bizarre theatrics of the store window, and mannequin designers drew inspiration from a narrow slice of the population—professional models, actresses, and society women—to mold their realistic char- acters. These kinds of women served as models because they were deemed an ideal type in some form, for their facial features and/ or body measurements. Even though Gaba and his contemporaries emphasized that their inspiration came from a variety of faces and figures, that variety seemed rather narrow in scope. Mannequins and narratives about them took an active role in the promotion of body and beauty standards during the Depression. Taken together with commentary that ramped up in the 1930s about types and norms, designers, journalists, home economists, and women across the country tried to reconcile the problem of fit in mass-produced cloth- ing with evolving body management practices, a conundrum that pitted real bodies against normal curves, construed as ideals.

Fitting In: Normal Bodies and American Ready-to-Wear Clothing In her 1938 book-length indictment of the frivolities of fashion, American fashion designer Elizabeth Hawes crusaded for better- fitting ready-to-wear clothing. Because Hawes designed custom gar- ments for discriminating women of means, her clientele already val- ued clothing that fit their bodies, and would pay a lot of money to attain a garment that fit their physique. But what about the majority of the population that could only afford to buy off-the-rack cloth- ing? Ever perched on her soapbox, she asked readers to think deeply about their approach to wearing clothes:

Are most ready-made clothes actually comfortable? Do they fit? Can they be “sized” right? I say no, not as they are now conceived and designed. There are no size 14 women in the world, nor are there any size 16. There is no whole- sale dress which fits any woman who buys it. No two women in the world have the same proportions, width of shoulder, length of arm, height of waist. The great majority of women in the United States, never having had their clothes made to fit them, have not the faintest idea what it is to be really com- fortable in clothes. . . . The vast majority of women are uncomfortable in their clothes whether they know it or not. . . . Machine production is in masses and

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should be for masses. It must be conceived in relation to the actual lives of the people who are going to wear it and not in relation to a group of women who lead lives of leisure.66

The “women who lead lives of leisure” were the exception to the masses. They constituted the outliers who enjoyed the luxury of cus- tom-fit clothing. For everyone else who did not even know that the clothing they bought at department stores only provided approxi- mate fit, they would never know what it felt like to be comfortable in their clothes. Not only that, but the sizes that women have been ac- customed to wearing did not (and still do not) neatly align with any- one’s bodies; they represented averages culled from anthropometric data, the clothing patterns scaled up and down for size gradations.67

Finding someone whose measurements aligned with the normal body, often construed as the ideal, was exceedingly rare. In Eugenic Design, Christina Cogdell shows that discursive and material instan- tiations of racial types in the 1930s led to linguistic slippage be- tween the words “norm,” “type,” and “ideal.” According to Cogdell, special displays of sculptures at museums and world’s fairs featur- ing composite averages of “native white Americans,”68 “reinforced to the public the existence of racial ‘norms.’”69 Cogdell continues, “Yet, as these classically posed, perfectly fit ‘universal Caucasian’ types showed, a racial ‘norm’ often simultaneously functioned as an ‘ideal.’”70 Some exhibitions intended to make explicit this eugenicist link, but in many other ways the slippage was subtle and uninten- tional, and it had far-reaching effects on understandings of “types” among US populations. Several attempts to enroll the entire nation in the search for the “perfectly average” body took place during the 1930s and 1940s. Nationwide contests were staged to find the man and woman whose dimensions most closely resembled that of the calculated and sculpted normal (average) body, though it was dif- ficult to find a perfect match.71

66. Elizabeth Hawes, Fashion Is Spinach (New York: Random House, 1938), 285–86.

67. Nancy A. Schofield, “Pattern Grading,” in Sizing in Clothing (above, n. 3), 152–201.

68. Cogdell, Eugenic Design (above, n. 4), 196–97.

69. Ibid., p. 196.

70. Ibid.

71. Ibid., p. 198; Carter, Heart of Whiteness (above, n. 4); Anna G. Creadick, Perfectly Average (above, n. 4), 15–41; Jacqueline Urla and Alan C. Swedlund, “The Anthropom- etry of Barbie: Unsettling Ideals of the Feminine Body in Popular Culture,” in Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture, Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla, eds. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 289–91. For a his- tory of how research, surveys, and statistics came to shape an understanding of “the

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As women relied less on home dressmaking and more on store- bought clothing, they shifted their expectations about the proper fit of store-bought clothes. Those who chose not to or didn’t know how to alter garments accepted as a given whatever size seemed to match their measurements most closely. A plethora of prescriptive litera- ture and social cues about clothing and body management practices reinforced the terms of the new relationship between ready-to-wear clothing and self-image. Scholars have shown that satisfaction with fit affects body cathexis, or the “evaluation of self and body.”72 In The Body Project, Joan Jacobs Brumberg discusses how negative body cathexis has existed since the early twentieth century, partly due to the problem of fit in off-the-rack clothing. In this case, with respect to bras, Brumberg raises in relief the correlation between an ill-fitting product and declining body satisfaction for young women:

So long as clothing was made at home, the dimensions of the garment could be adjusted to the particular body intended to wear it. But with store-bought clothes, the body had to fit instantaneously into standard sizes that were con- structed from a pattern representing a norm. When clothing failed to fit the body, particularly a part as intimate as the breasts, young women were apt to perceive that there was something wrong with their bodies.73

Brumberg and other body studies scholars have shown how mass media and influence among social groups have affected body im- age and dominant understandings of bodily beauty throughout the twentieth century.74 While these consequences looked different in various periods, I argue that the stakes heightened in the 1930s and 1940s, when the dialectical tensions around real and ideal bodies— informed by fashion practitioners, commercial artists, designers, journalists, and home economists—brought these discursive and material practices to the fore.

By the time Hawes published Fashion Is Spinach, the ready-to- wear industry was already in full swing, though as Rebecca Arnold

average American,” see Sarah E. Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).

72. Karen L. LaBat and Marilyn R. DeLong, “Body Cathexis and Satisfaction with Fit of Apparel,” Clothing and Textiles Research Journal 8.2 (Winter 1990), 43–48, at p. 43; and Karen L. LaBat, “Sizing Standardization,” in Sizing in Clothing (above, n. 3), 88–107.

73. Brumberg, The Body Project (above, n. 4), p. 110.

74. See also Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa (New York: Vintage Books, 1988); and Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

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notes, “Despite or perhaps because of the Depression, ready-to-wear grew in importance and volume over the course of the 1930s.”75 While Hawes was considered a rather niche “leftist intellectual”76 by many, fashion journalists and commentators had been reporting on the burgeoning American ready-made womenswear industry for decades, and critiques about the problem of fit in mass-produced clothing abounded in trade publications. Notably, a frequent col- umn in Women’s Wear Daily during the late 1930s and early 1940s entitled, “Seeing Things,” called for reform in mass production and sizing standards. The author, Sarah Fuertes Hitchcock, had been de- riding the effects of poor fit since the early twentieth century.77 The mail-order industry in particular had grown frustrated by the num- ber of returns it needed to process due to complaints about poor fit. By the mid-1930s, a team of mostly women textile experts and anthropometrists at the National Bureau of Home Economics, a sub- sidiary of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), intervened to help combat the issue.

Between 1937 and 1940, the USDA embarked on a campaign to systematically measure American women’s bodies in search of the normal curve. The project was partly staffed through the Works Proj- ect Administration, and headed by the consumer textiles scholar and home economist Ruth O’Brien; one of the study’s primary goals was to “provide measurements which could be used for improving the fit of women’s garments and patterns.”78 Researchers recruited 14,698 women across the United States, mainly between the ages of eigh- teen and forty-four years old, to participate in the anthropometric survey. The results laid the groundwork for what the Bureau at the

75. Arnold, The American Look (above, n. 4), p. 77.

76. Valerie Steele, Women of Fashion: Twentieth-Century Designers (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), p. 92.

77. Sarah Fuertes Hitchcock, “Bargains and Amazons,” Harper’s Weekly 54 (Jan. 1, 1910), p. 29. Fuertes Hitchcock lived near Ithaca, NY and was the daughter of renowned Cor- nell University ornithologist Louis Agassiz Fuertes. Though she did not graduate from Cornell, it’s likely that her views on the fit of ready-to-wear clothing were shaped by the active home economics department at Cornell in the early twentieth century. For a history of home economics at land grant universities, see, e.g., Sarah Stage and Vir- ginia B. Vincenti, eds., Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).

78. Ruth O’Brien and William C. Shelton, Women’s Measurements for Garment and Pat- tern Construction (Washington, D.C.: US Dept. of Agriculture, 1941), p. 1. See also Win- ifred Aldrich, “History of Sizing Systems and Ready-to-Wear Garments,” (above, n. 3), p. 2; “Standardization of Women’s Clothing,” National Institute of Standards and Tech- nology, July 20, 2003, http://museum.nist.gov/exhibits/apparel/index.htm.

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time believed was a sufficiently comprehensive classification of body types for “the Nation’s 40 million white women 18 years old and over.”79

A team of anthropometrists conducted the study by making land- mark points on the subjects’ bodies and taking fifty-eight measure- ments, including the anonymous subjects’ weight. Figure 2 depicts

79. O’Brien and Shelton, Women’s Measurements (above, n. 78), p. 28.

Figure 2. Anonymous subject, USDA anthropometric study. Ruth O’Brien and William C. Shelton, Women’s Measurements for Garment and Pattern Construction (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, 1941), Plate 1.

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such markings, as well as the method of anonymizing each subject by blanking out most of the woman’s face. The study was published in 1941 and ended up using the data from 10,042 of the 14,698 sub- jects. An accompanying table reveals the reasons behind eliminat- ing some of the participants, including “woman non-white,” “age of woman unknown,” “woman deformed,” “measurements omit- ted,” and “gross error made in measurements.”80 The publication acknowledged the limitations of the study, including a questionably representative sample of American women. Nonetheless, the mea- surements generated from the project, as well as one completed dur- ing World War II in which the military measured 6,510 Women’s Army Corps personnel, were applied toward recommendations for sizing standards issued in the late 1950s. The proportions of the nor- mal postwar body had grown since the Depression, hence the data was already skewed, but the outdated measurements persisted into the 1980s with some statistical finessing.81

Much like the variety of phenotypic features that made up mannequins in the 1930s and 1940s, the composite normal body amounted to a narrow understanding of a cross-section of the pop- ulation. While the standards that the Bureau ended up suggesting might have existed for good reason, we must acknowledge that those involved in the study made ethical choices about what information they deemed worthy of standardizing.82 Under the pretext of scien- tific management and rationalization, these ethical choices either deliberately or unintentionally carved out categories of difference, including race, gender, age, physique, and “able-bodiedness.” Prac- tices of quantifying, measuring, classifying, and standardizing white women’s bodies were always implicitly about the articulation and reinforcement of whiteness and bodily proportionality and sym- metry. The Bureau wanted more women to feel comfortable in the clothing they bought, no matter where they chose to shop. However, the consequences of these practices designated whether someone fit into the normal curve or was even considered part of the curve to begin with.83

Indeed, whether we refer to norms or ideals, it is a short leap from

80. Ibid., p. 25.

81. LaBat, “Sizing Standardization” (above, n. 72), p. 95.

82. Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Con- sequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).

83. Alana Staiti, “A Hands-On History of Sizing Standards in Clothing,” Cornell Society for the Humanities Annual Fellows’ Workshop, “Skin Practice,” (April 14, 2017), https://vimeo.com/214717910.

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the approximated normal body, made of composite “real women,” to an idealized “realistic” one. In the 1930s and 1940s, this language crystallized in merchandising trade literature and fashion commen- tary, explicitly linking discourses of health and beauty, taste, and the shaping of the modern white woman’s body. In an increasingly rationalized system of women’s sizing standards and clothing manu- facture, the fashion industry’s stakeholders needed to standardize not only the tools they used to design and manufacture garments, but also the manufactured and living models who wore the clothes.

We have seen how, despite claims about realism and variety of form and character, the American-made mannequin perpetuated nar- row understandings of body and beauty standards for white women. They appeared realistic precisely because of the artifice involved in the making-up of fashionable women. Their pale skin, pert noses, high cheekbones, and wistful gazes were promoted as an ideal type; their bodies, having been shaped from clay and molded in small batches, communicated proportionality, grace, and sophistication. Their faces, modeled from Hollywood actresses, society women, and professional models, exuded a cool demeanor that gave spectators the impression that the glamorous lives they led were impervious to the anxieties caused by the Depression.

Tensions over taste, appropriateness, and commercial appeal crys- tallized in the trade literature of merchandisers and display design- ers, who tried to reconcile what they saw as unnecessary avant-garde elitism in bizarre window displays with naturalistic mannequins de- rived from custom batches and molded into unique personalities. Surrealist-inspired department store windows could have offered a revelatory experience, laying bare the subversive goals of avant- garde artists interested in tapping into the spectator’s psyche. The mannequin taking part in surrealist art had a crucial role to play in awakening spectators from their dreamlike state, prompting them to think critically about the relationship between the human body and conformity in consumer capitalism. Instead, journalists and display folk praised the American-made mannequin in all her individuality and uniqueness. The siren in the surrealist window brought admir- ing passersby deeper into the dreamworld of American consumer- ism.

Turning attention to the shaping of real and ideal bodies gives us greater understanding of the role that mannequins, display pro- fessionals, and fashion practitioners played in a historical moment characterized by anxiety and uncertainty. The fact that Cynthia and mannequins like her infiltrated popular media attested to concerns about what it meant for white women with good taste to “fit in” and

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be fashionable in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. Anthro- pomorphized mannequins fittingly became exemplars of femininity and refined artificiality, serving as model women in their own right.

The life that we breathe into mannequins continues to shed light on critiques of mass production, consumerism, and the human body’s relationship to technology. Few technologies can claim to simultaneously carry out and interrogate the work of seductive com- mercial forces, and for that reason, in the 1930s and 1940s when the stakes seemed to heighten, not only did mannequins get a front-row seat to the show, but their mimetic attributes also afforded active participation in modern life.