Mannequins
Sam Hernandez
art by Golda Grais
Clothing is not designed for humans. Too imperfect, with unsightly lumps and misplaced curves, such variable humans can never provide the guarantee that fashion requires to execute its vision. As commodities, clothing sells itself not as utility but as signification: one buys clothing not because it functions as a superior shirt but because one believes that the shirt is a sign for something like their aesthetic taste, status, or wealth. Relying, then, on the value of the sign, clothing must be assured in its ability to project a potential lifestyle to the consumer—appearance supersedes the commodity itself. The consumer buys with their eyes, before they ever reach a dressing room. The moment of the initial encounter with the commodity, presented to them on a humanoid form, is the stricken match which ignites the fire of consumption. It is decisive. As a result, clothing exists for the mannequin.
The mannequin is always a deception, an illusory ideal of the everyman that becomes real through its artifice. There is no question that the mannequin is ahuman—a hunk of white plastic makes no pretensions towards flesh and blood, but in its inhumanity it thus attains an object status that enables a certain kind of objectivity. By resembling no one, it has come to resemble everyone, or, more accurately, everyone has come to resemble it. It appropriates human features and abstracts them from lived reality: a body without organs, curves without hips, a jawline without a jaw. More than that, though, the mannequin is endowed with the best version of each of these bodily components. It has not just a jawline, but a strong jawline, not just curves, but the right kind of curves that everyone wants but no one really has.
The desirability of these features is no mistake. It too is part of the construction of the appearance of the commodity. It is not enough for just the item itself to evoke desirable signification, the form on which it lays must itself be desirable. The faceless face of the mannequin is inoffensive yet attractive, the limbs and hands each generic yet pleasant, the mannequin embodies desirability in the most general sense. It is enticing, evoking an image of inhabiting a more alluring form, and it directs that libidinal desire towards the consumption of the commodities draped upon it. Because the mannequin purports a certain universality, though, the consumer both sees themselves as already within the mannequin and desires to become it. This dual identification and desire is necessary for the consumer to see the commodity as a possible signifier for themselves—if the ideal presented is entirely distant from the consumer, it appears unattainable and no longer incentivizes consumption.
However, the mannequin does more than embrace the desirability politics of society: it reinforces and shapes them. The mannequin is not a passive spectator to the generation of the desirable, it plays an active role in the interpellation of the individual, the consumer. In signifying what the ideal body is, the body that shows how clothing is quite literally meant to be worn, the mannequin imbues the subject with a notion of how they, and everyone, should look. This dialectic of desirability, in which the mannequin shapes desirability and is simultaneously shaped by it, constitutes a cycle of impossible allure in which the consumer remains perpetually almost-satisfied, at all times just one right purchase away from becoming that which is beautiful and wanted. It is upon this knife’s edge which the mannequin sits, straddling existing desirability models while also helping to guide their continuing evolution.
The mannequin represents the triumph of the signified over the real, and this extends even to photos of actual humans found in advertising. Although allegedly composed of flesh, muscle, tissue, and bone, the photoshop airbrush plasticizes even human skin. The cultivated image in a magazine spread or plastered onto a retail wall carries the same manufactured details, the same duplicity and artifice, as the mannequin, yet exaggerated to the greatest extent. In this case, a human image does lie under the makeup, posing, shot composition, photo editing, and filters, but is ultimately becomes a mannequin with a synthetic skin of a different tone. The image on the Vogue cover may not be a white plastic sculpture, but it is a two-dimensional artistic rendering of a human, a compilation of signs that plays at personhood, equally selling an aesthetic of life rather than the utility of the garments in which it is adorned.
Fashion, as an industry, is therefore concerned with maintaining the appearance of the human rather than engaging with living bodies. The reproduction of culture, at least within the realm of fashion aesthetics, exists for its own sake, entirely divorced from interaction within the real as humans. It does not reference or need real people—it operates as an entirely self-referential sign system, independent and self-reliant. Its only engagement with the world external to it is through consumption, both of the signs represented by fashion commodities and of the consumer, as the consumer ingests these signs as various potential selves and in the same process is ingested by them, their own significatory potentials are absorbed and incorporated into the new signs generated by the next round of fashion.
When individuals who embrace a certain aesthetic find a new commodity to incorporate into their sub-culture, the commodity itself also consumes the other signs already within that aesthetic and takes them on as its own. This mutual consumption can be seen in the example in the example of ripped jeans. Wealthy individuals, seeking an appearance of grit, poverty, and ‘realness’ began to buy ripped jeans because they believed it to signify those aesthetics (rather than because ripped jeans have some sort of aesthetic value in themselves or more utility as pants). In that same process, though, ripped jeans came to no longer signify what they used to; now, ripped jeans are disproportionately found in middle/upper class retail outlets and signify those class signs instead. When one sees a person in ripped jeans, the assumption is no longer that the jeans were ripped through use, it is presumed that they were purchased that way. Thus, the exchange of signs is never complete, it is an always-already-ongoing process without beginning or end.
This relation of signs is not unique to fashion, however; it permeates all interaction under late-stage capitalism. Individuals, groups, identities, and commodities are all taking signs from and bestowing signs on each other at all times, and it is through this lens of signification that all other exchange, whether interpersonal or within the market, occur. The mannequin serves as a testament to the supersession of humans as central within the operation of capitalism, as well as evidence of the mass replicability of the human image through technology. Capitalism no longer needs real humans to commodify and sell the appearance of being human—it needs only the mannequin and its derivatives.
The mannequin is always a deception, an illusory ideal of the everyman that becomes real through its artifice. There is no question that the mannequin is ahuman—a hunk of white plastic makes no pretensions towards flesh and blood, but in its inhumanity it thus attains an object status that enables a certain kind of objectivity. By resembling no one, it has come to resemble everyone, or, more accurately, everyone has come to resemble it. It appropriates human features and abstracts them from lived reality: a body without organs, curves without hips, a jawline without a jaw. More than that, though, the mannequin is endowed with the best version of each of these bodily components. It has not just a jawline, but a strong jawline, not just curves, but the right kind of curves that everyone wants but no one really has.
The desirability of these features is no mistake. It too is part of the construction of the appearance of the commodity. It is not enough for just the item itself to evoke desirable signification, the form on which it lays must itself be desirable. The faceless face of the mannequin is inoffensive yet attractive, the limbs and hands each generic yet pleasant, the mannequin embodies desirability in the most general sense. It is enticing, evoking an image of inhabiting a more alluring form, and it directs that libidinal desire towards the consumption of the commodities draped upon it. Because the mannequin purports a certain universality, though, the consumer both sees themselves as already within the mannequin and desires to become it. This dual identification and desire is necessary for the consumer to see the commodity as a possible signifier for themselves—if the ideal presented is entirely distant from the consumer, it appears unattainable and no longer incentivizes consumption.
However, the mannequin does more than embrace the desirability politics of society: it reinforces and shapes them. The mannequin is not a passive spectator to the generation of the desirable, it plays an active role in the interpellation of the individual, the consumer. In signifying what the ideal body is, the body that shows how clothing is quite literally meant to be worn, the mannequin imbues the subject with a notion of how they, and everyone, should look. This dialectic of desirability, in which the mannequin shapes desirability and is simultaneously shaped by it, constitutes a cycle of impossible allure in which the consumer remains perpetually almost-satisfied, at all times just one right purchase away from becoming that which is beautiful and wanted. It is upon this knife’s edge which the mannequin sits, straddling existing desirability models while also helping to guide their continuing evolution.
The mannequin represents the triumph of the signified over the real, and this extends even to photos of actual humans found in advertising. Although allegedly composed of flesh, muscle, tissue, and bone, the photoshop airbrush plasticizes even human skin. The cultivated image in a magazine spread or plastered onto a retail wall carries the same manufactured details, the same duplicity and artifice, as the mannequin, yet exaggerated to the greatest extent. In this case, a human image does lie under the makeup, posing, shot composition, photo editing, and filters, but is ultimately becomes a mannequin with a synthetic skin of a different tone. The image on the Vogue cover may not be a white plastic sculpture, but it is a two-dimensional artistic rendering of a human, a compilation of signs that plays at personhood, equally selling an aesthetic of life rather than the utility of the garments in which it is adorned.
Fashion, as an industry, is therefore concerned with maintaining the appearance of the human rather than engaging with living bodies. The reproduction of culture, at least within the realm of fashion aesthetics, exists for its own sake, entirely divorced from interaction within the real as humans. It does not reference or need real people—it operates as an entirely self-referential sign system, independent and self-reliant. Its only engagement with the world external to it is through consumption, both of the signs represented by fashion commodities and of the consumer, as the consumer ingests these signs as various potential selves and in the same process is ingested by them, their own significatory potentials are absorbed and incorporated into the new signs generated by the next round of fashion.
When individuals who embrace a certain aesthetic find a new commodity to incorporate into their sub-culture, the commodity itself also consumes the other signs already within that aesthetic and takes them on as its own. This mutual consumption can be seen in the example in the example of ripped jeans. Wealthy individuals, seeking an appearance of grit, poverty, and ‘realness’ began to buy ripped jeans because they believed it to signify those aesthetics (rather than because ripped jeans have some sort of aesthetic value in themselves or more utility as pants). In that same process, though, ripped jeans came to no longer signify what they used to; now, ripped jeans are disproportionately found in middle/upper class retail outlets and signify those class signs instead. When one sees a person in ripped jeans, the assumption is no longer that the jeans were ripped through use, it is presumed that they were purchased that way. Thus, the exchange of signs is never complete, it is an always-already-ongoing process without beginning or end.
This relation of signs is not unique to fashion, however; it permeates all interaction under late-stage capitalism. Individuals, groups, identities, and commodities are all taking signs from and bestowing signs on each other at all times, and it is through this lens of signification that all other exchange, whether interpersonal or within the market, occur. The mannequin serves as a testament to the supersession of humans as central within the operation of capitalism, as well as evidence of the mass replicability of the human image through technology. Capitalism no longer needs real humans to commodify and sell the appearance of being human—it needs only the mannequin and its derivatives.
Sam Hernandez (PO '24) is a philosophy major from San Antonio, Texas who enjoys writing and thinking about stuff from time to time.