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  Mannequins: The Fashion District and Beyond
 
 

Freeway Flyer buses stop at the Exposition Boulevard station, adjacent to

Mannequins are everywhere in metropolitan Los Angeles.  In virtually every department store and clothing shop, mannequins submissively serve their owners, who use them to tell us what we should be wearing and how we should be projecting our hipped-up selves.

During the 1930s, surrealist artists were preoccupied with mannequins, which (as historian Margaret Plant observed) they viewed as symbols  of America's decaying consumerist culture.  In the Exhibition Internationale du Surrealism, mannequins were treated as "phantom object-beings," to be entrapped in department store windows and cages.

Nothing much has changed since then.  Mannequins continue to make people feel uneasy. For some, they seem spooky, even scary.  Maybe that is because "phantom object beings" are inherently scary. Or maybe we just don't like the fact that mannequins remind us of our way-out-of-control consumerism. They cartoon our desire to fulfill breezy L.A. lifestyle dreams.w people ever get on.  At most hours of the

 


   
 
Mannequin store window


Boy and girl at the mannequin store

 
     
 
Christmas


Diagonal, Two women
2
 
   
 
Mannequin nudes


Hanging torsos
 
     
 
Chic mannequins


Mannequins at Vietnamese mall

 
   
 
Male mannequins and starry sky

 

Hat models

 
     
 
Day of the dead mannequin


Hanging torsos, 2
 
   
 
Modesty


 
   
 
Homeless, armless mouse mannequin


L.A. noir

 
   
 
Srouded mannequin
Ms. Sparkle