Shop window dummies are much more than simply clothes hangers, they also mould our aspirations

IN 1936, a glamour girl named Cynthia became a minor toast of Manhattan. She went around with a guy named Lester, who took her to all the show-off places – the opera, El Morocco – and the following year she made the cover of Life.

• Creative director Rootstein used British model Agyness Deyn as the inspiration for a mannequin. Picture: Getty

Cynthia would get fan mail, but if anyone ever got a reply, it always came from Lester.

That's because Cynthia was a mannequin. She was 120lbs of plaster and paint, the work of Lester Gaba. Saks Fifth Avenue had wanted a lifelike mannequin, and Lester, a soap sculptor to trade, needed little encouragement. Calling her Cynthia was his crowning touch.

The war passed and, in 1953, Lester thought his hollow lady should have a TV show. He spent $10,000 (about 6,634) to have her jaw wired so she could say witty things, and he hid the cables in the back of her Dior dress. But it was no good, he told The New York Times, some years later. "Cynthia never made any sense," he said. She was finally escorted to a Greenwich Village attic.

Why does this sound so familiar? The mannequin hair, sleek and heavy-falling, and lipsticked smiles that meet every fashion parade and murder with the same frozen interest are par for the course on US TV news. The anchors deliver meaningless happy chatter as the world falls apart. Saying something actually disturbing is out of the question. And in no way are they in control – any more than Cynthia or the survival-conscious actress who turns her face into a sheet of plastic.

"It's not that big of a leap to go to a window mannequin from The Real Housewives of Orange County," said Simon Doonan, the UK-born creative director of Barneys New York.

Nor is it news that in America, at least, people would rather shop than have sex – even better, while we are knowingly being manipulated by Lady Gaga. But it's hard on the soul to have to keep making adjustments for the downside. The irony of the talking mannequin head is that it only begins to make sense when it has nothing relevant to say, when it embodies an emptiness of purpose and doesn't see a problem in that.

It is said that the ideal time to view shop windows is at dusk. One evening a few weeks ago a friend driving past Saks Manhattan looked and said, "I wonder what mannequins tell us about who we are."

At their best they tell us how we stand and carry our bodies; whether we want to be tall, willowy, athletic, busty, Amazonian, and if we need to pay attention to our arches. But even at their worst – headless, colourless, listless – a mannequin tells us about ourselves.

Twenty or 30 years ago, it was relatively easy to walk down New York's Fifth Avenue and see differences in mannequins, differences not only in colour and ethnic characteristics but also attitude and even emotion, which were conveyed by the novelty of the displays and, of course, the fashion. Nowadays, though, with few exceptions, the great avenue provides a window into limited resources and eroded convictions. By using the generic-looking mannequins, the shops seem to want to erase the issue of race and ethnic identity – as much as blogs now serve to highlight these distinctions.

"A lot of stores just avoid that issue by spraying everything gloss white and not putting any features on the mannequin," said Michael Steward, the executive vice-president of Rootstein, a top specialist in realistic mannequins based in New York and London. "They don't want to make a mistake."

Similarly, he said, a designer client will spend $50,000 (about 33,100) a day for a model for an advertising shoot but will fret over the choice of mannequin until finally saying, "Oh, just make it headless."

As for the hot topic of body shape, mannequin makers do care – up to a point. Since the purpose of a mannequin is to display goods, its measurements can't be too far out of line with standard dress sizes. A bit bustier and fuller in the hips, fine. But a shape that actually reflects many women's bodies is a tough sell. Ralph Pucci, a maker of abstracts, produced a plumpish mannequin a while back, but sold hardly any. "It was just a big wow in the press, and stores went back to tried and true, US size 2 and 4," Pucci said.

But mannequin creators are adjutants of the fashion world as much as they are agitators. The best have a strong eye for unusual beauty and contemporary stances.

"I don't think we've ever done a thoroughbred English girl," said Kevin Arpino, the creative director of Rootstein, who used the androgynous British model Agyness Deyn as the basis for a mannequin before she became a success. (The process begins with a model posing for a sculptor.) "Agyness epitomised that moment, just as Beyonc does now," he said.

Yet, evidently, he thinks Beyonc would look better if part of her body were eliminated, so what thought does she epitomise? Last year, at the request of Beyonc's mother, Tina Knowles, Rootstein made a mannequin of the singer for their fashion label House of Dereon. The result is amazingly lifelike – from the waist up. "Her mother didn't want her hips to be 42 inches," Arpino recalled. "I said exactly the same. We took off four inches from her hips." When asked if her body wasn't integral to how we perceive her as a performer, he replied: "Ah, see that's a $1 million question. When you see a photograph of Beyonc, it's actually a stretched version of her."

Paradoxically, fashion blogs give Arpino many of his ideas. He also relies on what he sees on the street. He said that he prefers blogs like thecontributingeditor.com and the makeup artist Pat McGrath's Facebook page to fashion magazines because the imagery tends to be contemporary as well as historical and the references come from unexpected sources. Next month, Rootstein will offer a line of reed-thin male mannequins.

"The models and singers in Japan who are doing the advertising all look like a load of girls," Arpino said. "And all the straight boys are trying to look like girls. Apparently their girlfriends like them that way: as tall and skinny as possible, with makeup on."

He has had to reshape the feet of female mannequins to take higher heels. Faces reflect a mixture of ethnic backgrounds. He is currently working with a Korean-Norwegian woman and another who is a mix of Persian and Swedish. "They look a bit like beauty queens, funny enough, with high cheekbones and square jaws," he said, adding, "a bit of the Yasmeen Ghauri look." She was a well-known model in the 1990s.

Many retailers prefer abstract mannequins for reasons of aesthetics and cost, a consideration as they shift more marketing dollars to online sales and reduce display staffs. "It's an easier way of getting the message across," Richard Fosdick, the merchandise display director at Saks, said of abstracts.

But, according to Doonan and others, like Jonny Hooley, who is responsible for displays in 63 Zara stores in Britain, realistics are, in Hooley's words, "creeping back." He says it's because young consumers want to be inspired and are bored with the sameness of everything. Though Doonan uses abstracts at Barneys, he understands the appeal of a wig: "There's a whole generation of display people who never went through the period when realistics were naff. Now it's like, let's make her look like Lady Gaga."

It would be great to see more shop windows that have a feel for the world they are trying to reach and not simply play host to its empty chatter. Forget a fat mannequin – what about a tattooed young woman who customises her own clothes? Windows used to be a stage for caprice and drama, never more so than when artist Victor Hugo arranged to have a mannequin give birth in the windows of Halston on Madison Avenue in the 1970s. Now all that energy takes place on the web.