Salon de Paris

Big breasts for dummies

Mannequins with giant bazooms are busting out in shop windows from coast to coast. More than just garment racks, they are a mirror of current beauty and fashion.

By Wendy Paris

Jan. 03, 2007 | I was in Miami in October, strolling past the retail shops . I wasn't the only one staring. The mannequins -- one wearing a tight white bikini and the other a flirty miniskirt and a T-shirt tied at the waist -- were modeled after women who'd had breast augmentation surgery and gone in for DDDD cups. These buxom Fiberglas beauties weren't in a head shop or an adult video store, but rather at Deco Denim, a family-owned Miami retail group specializing in brand-name denim and casual wear.

I've never been one to complain about our culture's obsession with beauty, to worry that shows like "Extreme Makeover" normalize plastic surgery in an already looks-focused society. You won't hear me ranting against Botox treatments at the mall. "Which mall?" is more likely my response, "And how much does it cost?" But these mannequins with their massive chests crossed the line from a little harmless obsession with appearance to a society run amok.

I grabbed my husband's hand and jerked him to a stop in front of the store. "Look at that!" I demanded. He was already looking. I was suddenly conscious of my own chest and its relative lack of girth. It's easy to feel physically inadequate in South Beach, to see oneself as too short or too fat or too insufficiently swathed in lime green Spandex. Perhaps mannequins with boob jobs were just a South Beach thing?

Dress dummies and mannequins have existed in some form since the time of the pharaohs, but it wasn't until the turn of the last century, with the rise of the "designed" department store window, that they were transformed from shapeless props into realistic figures, and became a fixture of fashion retailing. I knew a mannequin's role in life was to help a retailer sell more clothes, and in recent years, help sell a retailer's brand identity as well. But typically they are supposed to be slim and lithe, aspirational, the plastic version of twiggy fashion models. Or so I thought. "Mannequins are considered the ideal beauty of our time," said Marie Davis, editor in chief of wmfmannequin.com  an online magazine for fashion and visual merchandising. "But they're also political. Whatever is happening in the world is also happening in the mannequins. They have to reflect society or people won't buy the clothes."

Oh, great. I hate the idea that a surgically achieved, über-chesty look is an ideal for anyone -- beyond participants at an exotic dancer convention. After all, the average size of the American female chest is 34B. And while there were about 330,000 breast augmentation surgeries done in the U.S. last year, that's not a majority of shoppers. Even with the FDA's recent re-approval of the appealingly squishy silicone implants, women with breast jobs are not really a large enough market to warrant their own fashions. At least not yet. With more mannequins with super-bazoombas showing up in stores, how long will it be before more women are asking, "How much is that chest in the window?"

After a 15-minute walk through a litter-strewn, semi-residential area of Queens, I came to the Groupe WMF Inc  warehouse, located in New jersey.

Inside WMF Mannequin  connected to a huge warehouse. Fifty slender mannequins and three hyper-buxom models stood around a large. I walked over to the somewhat slutty-looking "Jessica," who was naked except for a wig of ash blond corkscrew curls and a cigarette hanging from her mouth. She stood next to the red-haired, mega-breasted "Anna," and the similarly huge, African-American "Anita." In a smaller photo room, the chesty "Mary" stood naked and wigless. Her high, round breasts came up to my collarbone. They were bigger than her face, the nipples painted Bazooka bubblegum pink.

 she explained, after she asked the fabricators at factory in China to create inexpensive dress forms with American proportions for her fellow students.Lina claimed to have invented the enhanced-breast mannequin last year after seeing a Broadway dancer with a "really big bust -- when she walked on to the stage, people cheered. The sculptor in China could not believe anyone would want such a large chest. "I kept saying, 'Bigger, bigger,'" said Lina. "But the sculptor could not accept this at first.

When he did, he put the chest in the wrong place. "He originally made them dropped down, like on a real person," Up close, the breasts weren't the only part that looked fake. The bodies were smooth and fluid, without the angles and wrinkles of real people. Their rose-pink nail polish was spray-painted on, often covering more than just the nails. As with all mannequins, they had seams in their wrists and shoulders and hips where a visual merchandiser would unscrew the limbs to put on the clothes.

While traditional, high-end mannequin makers employ classically trained sculptors to mold mannequins from live models, factories such as Xu's knock off preexisting forms. Copying saves about $5,000 in artist and model fees per design.

Besides, the designer is content with girls. "To me, they seem like a real person. So far, Lina has sold her bust-enhanced forms to only a handful of stores and individuals. She's confident sales will grow, though she acknowledges that it's too soon to tell. I had to admit, I did see the potential. After 30 minutes of staring at the super-sized chests, they started to look normal. They looked good. When I walked over to "Judy," a more typical female form, she looked too flat, boyish, almost deformed. Where were her big, happy pink nipples?

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Steve Kaufman, editor of VM+SD, a trade magazine about visual merchandising and store design, assured me that hefty-chested mannequins did not have, well, legs. "The high-end stores -- Saks, Neiman's, Bergdorf, Bloomingdale's -- are not looking for outsized figures," he explained on the phone. "They don't change out mannequins every six months; they're too expensive. They want a timeless look. They're looking to show off their garments, and their garments hang better on a classic mannequin with small breasts and slim hips. The boob-job mannequins are way too trendy."

Arpino was outside smoking a cigarette. He was taking a break from making the Manhattan showroom look like a swank hotel lobby to display the company's two new collections for Winter Market -- the mannequin-district open house. Winter Market was being held in conjunction with StoreXpo, New York's annual visual merchandising trade show, running the first week of December this year.

In early December, the low winter sun streamed through the mass of glass that is the entry pavilion of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, home that week to StoreXpo, New York's annual store-design trade show -- and the place to see mannequins from companies without New York showrooms. The Javits' glass walls and ceiling, with their visible metal supports, recall the triangle at the Louvre -- only square and soaring and gridlike, affixed to a temple of commerce rather than art.

The show itself was surprisingly calm, more like a suburban mall on a weekday morning than like Macy's at Herald Square the week before Christmas. Store designers strolled the carpeted aisles, looking at molded plastic hangers, jewelry display stands in carrot-colored velvet, beer taps wired to logos that flash when a beer is poured.

And mannequins. White plastic mannequins with magnetic fittings from the Australian company OzMannequins.com. Smooth-faced, milky-skinned, alien-like mannequins from the Canadian WMFGroup. Realistic mannequins slumping and moping and pouting about. And one bust-enhanced mannequin, "Jena," a platinum blond wearing a floor-length sheer dressing gown over her DDDD chest. Jena was on offer from the Quebec firm WMF  Mannequins.

Owner and Quebecois Zineb Benkiran, who'd just introduced Jena that week, claimed that she'd invented the bust-enhanced mannequin -- at least in Canada. As at Deco Denim in Miami, Jena's presence at the convention caused many people to stop, and then shop. Sales were strong for her more traditional wares. "It's important to make quelque chose qui frappe. Something that shocks," Benkiran said

Benkiran thinks Jena will be most popular with sex shops, but she got the idea from ordinary people. "So many people have had the operation to be bigger in Canada," she said. "Even 15-year-old girls. Me? I'm big already. I want to be smaller. But others like it."

On the far end of the room, a line of mannequins by various producers posed on an elevated "runway," flaunting outfits designed by students from the Fashion Institute of Technology. There were silver-skinned mannequins, glossy pitch-black mannequins, one mannequin with a cartoon face on a realistic female body. There were also cute Fiberglas dog mannequins created by Ronis Bros., and dressed in pizza-parlor checked skirts and crinkly crinolines. This is the kind of Fiberglas ingenuity I like to see, I thought: cute dogs!

I was wondering where I could buy a checkered skirt for my own poodle puppy, when a man who introduced himself as Fred Kettler pointed out the realistic skin tone of a human mannequin he thought I was eying. Kettler is the co-founder of L.A.'s Moving Mannequins, a company using makeup techniques gleaned from Hollywood special effects.Big-busted mannequins, it turns out, won't be taking over Macy's anytime soon. Their market remains trendy boutiques like Deco Denim. But now I have something new to fret about: Fiberglas celebrities in every window. Party Britney at the Gap. Pregnant Angelina at Pea in the Pod. Talking to Kettler, I suddenly saw the future: the celebrity double as dress form. And all at once those DDDD models seemed harmless -- not the signal of our civilization's decline, but just a bunch of dummies.