Sculpting Beauty: A Cultural Analysis of Mannequin Design and Fashionable Feminine Silhouettes

This thesis situates the fashion mannequin as the primary artefact of a critical and historical examination that culminates in an extended study of the modern display mannequin and the cultural sources of its design. The research centres on the interrelationship between the design of the mannequin and its representations of the fashionable female body with specific reference to developments in the realistic display figure from 1960 to 1990. The investigation is based in an interdisciplinary analysis of the object and the aesthetic processes and working practices that underlie the realisation of these forms. It is a study formed by cumulative developments in its research methods in sourcing and interpreting existing material culture evidence of the mannequin as an artefact of historical and contemporary significance. The progressions in the materiality of the fashion mannequin, its varied conceptualisations and representations of feminine realism are the construct of the research approach and its core questions.

The thesis ultimately contributes new knowledge of previously undocumented processes in the production of the display mannequin from archival and interview research in the context of the central study of the mannequin manufacturers, Rootstein, founded in London in 1959. This analysis of the design and form of the modern realistic mannequin is the original intervention of the thesis to the subject area from primary industry-based research from the Rootstein company archive. The thesis therefore introduces to the field of scholarship a British based company history of the professional and cultural role of the mannequin and the correspondences forged between fashion, visual culture and design in its making.