MANNEQUINS IN THE MUSEUM

Sew What | Enya Barbeau 

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Mannequins are a mainstay of fashion and historic dress exhibitions. Not only can they act as an effective conservational mount for fragile garments, but they also provide visitors with a sense of how clothing items were intended to appear and function on the human body. However, behind the polished public gallery exists a thorny set of practical and intellectual challenges associated with using mannequins in a museum context.

Robe à la française, mannequin à la Met (source). 

A baseline issue is one of sizing and fit. The proportions of commercially available mannequins don’t correspond well with historic clothing, leaving it up to museum professionals to try to retrofit the mounts to better support the garments in their collections. A variety of techniques are used: padding and carving out retail mannequins, as well as fashioning portions of the figure from Fosshape and Ethafoam. These approaches are labour-intensive and require a discerning (and perhaps artistically trained) eye for the human form. Of course, the issue of fit could be eliminated through the use of custom mounts—but based on the financial reality in which most museums operate, it seems almost cruel to present pricey made-to-measure mannequins as a workable solution.

What is this "funding" of which you speak? (source).

Fitting mannequins to the garments is just the tip of the iceberg. In “Exhibiting Gender: Exploring the Dynamic Relationships between Fashion, Gender, and Mannequins in Museum Display,” Chloe Chapin, Denise Nicole Green, and Samuel Neuberg offer a thoughtful analysis of how the use of mannequins in exhibitions is entangled with broader questions of aesthetics and identity. In their survey of North American museum professionals, the authors found that the postures and poses of retail mannequins not only stand out as anachronistic and when displaying dress from eras past, but also reinforce exclusionary gender and beauty archetypes: “In addition to feeling that mannequins did not represent the breadth of gender expression, respondents also were critical for their not representing the diversity of fashioned bodies that exist globally and highlighted other intersecting subject positions like age, ethnicity, and ability as lacking.” The article highlights some of the creative work that people are doing to overcome the dearth of representative mannequins—such as the padding out of a dress form to represent a body that undergone top surgery for the Iowa State University exhibition Queer Fashion & Style: Stories from the Heartland.

Chant "Masahiro Mori" three times and he appears (source).

Another layer of thought revolves around questions of animation and materiality. Clothes are meant to be worn on a living body; although mannequins act as effective stand-in, garments still undergo a process of disembodiment and decontextualization when they sit static on these humanoid forms. Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wilson outline this phenomenon in the essay “The Body Clothed”: “Dress, the body and the self constitute a totality, and when dress and body are pulled apart, as in the costume museum, we grasp only a fragment, a partial snapshot of dress … Its displays cannot tell us how a garment moved when on the body, what it sounded like when it moved and how it felt to the wearer.” Museum workers try to close this gap in a number of ways. Some displays try to create a sense of embodiment through the use hyper-realistic mannequins—although this direction easily veers into Uncanny Valley. Others try to conjure the dynamism of a living body by augmenting mannequin displays with audio-visual content, live actors, and other special effects. In the 2011 Montreal Museum of Fine Arts exhibition The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier,  clothed mannequins rotated around the gallery on a motorized belt. The same year, the Met exhibition Savage Beauty: Alexander McQueen deployed fans to produce a gentle movement in the garments on display.

Like so many aspects of the museum field, mounting clothing for exhibitions involves extensive consideration and preparations behind the scenes before the finished product is brought into public view.  Next time you see a mannequin on display, try to evaluate the interpretive and aesthetic impact it has on your museum experience.