?One size fits all? no longer applies to mannequins.
With retailers fighting for customers in the sluggish economic recovery, the generic white, hairless, skinny mannequin is being pushed aside by provocative alternatives that entice shoppers with muscles, unusual poses, famous faces and lifelike bodies.
?The customer shops from the mannequin,? said Jenny Ming, chief executive of the youth retailer Charlotte Russe, where poses for new mannequins are drawn from red-carpet celebrity pictures, and feature pierced ears, articulated fingers for rings and flexed feet for high heels. ?The No. 1 reason our customers come in is because they see something they like.?
The Disney Stores chain has added little-boy figurines that fly from the ceiling and little-girl ones that curtsey. Nike has made its mannequins taller, and added about 35 athletic poses. Armani Exchange has ordered models that will lie down to help shoppers imagine wearing lingerie. A new accessories-only store by Guess features glossy black mannequins in model-like poses on an actual runway, while Ralph Lauren?s new women?s store in Manhattan commissioned mannequins with the face of the model Yasmin Le Bon.
It is all part of a new appreciation for old-fashioned window dressing. During the 1990s and early 2000s, many stores cut costs by hiring inexperienced workers to outfit their mannequins, and generic was best as the dummies needed to be dummy-proof. But with shoppers getting increasingly persnickety, retailers are expecting their store displays to serve as ?come on in? advertising, with the made-to-order mannequins sending a very specific message.
?They personify their brand with their mannequin statements, and they?re looking for something a little more customized or unique,? said Peter Huston, brand president at Fusion Specialties, a mannequin company in Colorado whose sales, almost all of custom mannequins, rose 48% last year.
One of Fusion?s customers is Athleta, the sportswear company owned by Gap. It commissioned mannequins based on a catalogoue model, Danielle Halverson, a track-and-field athlete training for the Olympics.
Fusion Specialties digitally scanned Halverson in stationary and action sequences. Then, over about two weeks, seven sculptors created clay renderings of the 3-D digital scans that ?hand-etched her from a tiny pile of clay down to the tiny delineations of the sinew in the muscle,? said Tess Roering, vice-president for marketing at Athleta, which opened its first physical stores this year.
After making more prototypes, Fusion produced the Dani-quin, as Athleta executives started calling the mannequin, in five variations. The running pose, especially, looks realistic: She is in midstride, with only her left toes on the ground. The Dani-quin, by the way, is headless.
?We wanted to make sure that our customers weren?t worrying about the hair, or anything else,? Roering said.
Michael Steward, executive vice-president of Rootstein US, which makes mannequins for stores like Ralph Lauren, Chanel and Neiman Marcus, said the newfound appreciation for speciality mannequins came as many retailers reassessed the market.