British department store Debenhams has introduced a line of mannequins that are more like the size of the women who shop there. Meanwhile in Venezuela, the trend is for mannequins with exaggerated breasts and buttocks, which also look like local women, but only the ones who can afford surgery. Is there change afoot in store windows? The British store, a sort of midlevel clothing retailer like Macy’s, will place the new mannequins, which are equivalent to a size 14 in the U.S., next to the standard size-10 dummies on the women’s-clothing floors at its shop on Oxford Street in London. Eventually it plans to roll out the larger painted ladies to all 170 of its stores in the U.K. The Venezuelan mannequins are not new, but they have become more popular in that country recently. Debenhams may have been inspired by the publicity conferred on Swedish chain Ahlens, which has been using fuller-figure mannequins among its lingerie displays for about three years, but which got a lot of attention earlier this year when a photo of one of its displays was picked up by a women’s-rights group and went viral. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, Ahlens, one of Sweden’s biggest department-store chains, is owned by a woman, Antonia Ax:son Johnson (not a misprint, that’s the correct spelling, pronounced Axelson). (MORE: Woman’s Quest to Avoid Mirrors for a Year Raises Questions of Body Image) In speaking about the change, Debenhams director Ed Watson said the store had been working on the project for about 10 years. “We hope that it will help people in some small way to feel comfortable about their bodies and, crucially, that other retailers will follow,” he added. Crucially, one imagines, for his bottom line especially. The story is a little different over in Venezuela, where the mannequin change came from the bottom up (sorry). Struggling mannequin makers were looking for something that might make their product stand out, so they enhanced the body shapes’ curves, giving them larger breasts and buttocks. The bodies look disproportionate, but those mannequins became the best sellers, perhaps![]()
