the future of fashion is ‘faceless’…
As a great fan of the mannequin, nothing has disturbed me more than the rise of the mannequin without a face…these ‘robots’ that have arrived on mass in the high street over the past decade have given me the ‘he bee, gee bees’…every high street shop has them so there is no escape..& earlier this year this type of mannequin hit the headlines, when a customer complained about their body shape..saying that it was ‘ridiculous’ but what about the missing face??? Has no one complained about that? And if they haven’t, then maybe I should? They are anonymous, blank, missing any ‘identity’, there are homogeneous & to me represent the rise of ‘blandism’. You could say that they are a blank ‘spectre’, where because of their missing identity we can therefore, safely project our’s onto it..& that is ‘how they work’ perhaps. After all they are just for displaying clothes so why should they need a face?? Which would give them some ‘individuality’ & ‘personality’..no! We can’t have that now, when we’re ‘all meant to look the same’...by their very design they are not meant to give ‘any offence’ but that didn’t quite work earlier this year, did it with the media storm around the Topshop mannequin? Hmmmm…
You could say, they do a dam good job of displaying clothes, in a ‘no nonsense’ fashion – as ‘here are the clothes’, ‘here are the accessories’ etc without the complication of identity by having a face or a race, call me old fashioned but I definitely prefer to see some sort of a face thank you! I mean some of the designs are so bad it looks like the face has just been ‘hacked off’..so when I see a mannequin with an identity I’m like yippee! Though usually now it’s ‘only’ in a charity shop, yes those ‘queens’ that once adorned high street shop windows are now relegated to the back streets…where they are usually in bad repair…with missing hands & a wig hanging off, so what it’s to be done about it?
The tide has turned firmly against individuality in this arena, for ‘no personality’ to just a ‘form of a human’, or at least that is what it seems…so do I propose to go back to how it was before? Hell yes! But with a twist..personalise them even more by having faces of ‘ordinary folk’ i.e. you & me projected onto the present blank face…yes it might be a bit freaky at first (I demonstrate here an example with my head transplanted on..a Topshop mannequin) but we’ll get used to it & will not even ‘bat an eyelid’…& while we’re at it they definitely do need to add a few more body shapes…(as what’s going on at present is not totally working…)
So with my mannequin & ‘muse’ Marianne I am trying to put back what is missing, some vestige of identity & of course she’s ‘idealised’ as she is my fashion muse…so her figure & face are ‘perfection’ she came like it & there is not a lot I can do about that now…(though in the past I have dreamed of making my own mannequin..) but why she is like that it’s a whole other story & crosses so many different disciplines that it would not be possible here to address all the issues…! What I can do as Ms Nestie is put my ‘two penneth’ in. I dearly wish I could solve all the world’s ‘identity problems’ but that is just not practical, possible or realistic! (Honestly..) So it looks like this blandism of our shop displays isn’t going to change any time soon, though could you imagine the uproar if they & only they appeared in fashion magazines? No models, no humans…I wonder will that be the future?? Is it time to maybe ‘travel forward’ in Dr Who’s Tardis to see if that provides any answers…or will that just draw another fashion ‘blank’….?
