The fashion industry is a vast world that includes various branches and satellite disciplines, such as "Visual Merchandising". Originally, this label referred to display windows featuring mannequins in department stores.
Throughout the years print media, television and - more recently - the digital revolution radically changed the way fashion reaches out to consumers, eroding the impact that traditional displays with dummies used to have.
Yet the work of seminal manufacturers such as Pucci Mannequins took this art to another level, as proved by a recently opened exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York - "Ralph Pucci: The Art of the Mannequin".
Founded in 1955 in Mount Vernon by Pucci's parents, the company was originally a mannequin repair shop.
As the years passed, Ralph Pucci developed new and more intriguing forms and shapes, leaving behind the predictable mannequin in favour of figures doing handstands, vaulting, or even riding bikes.
In the early '80s, after Pucci formed an association with Swiss manufacturer Schläppi, Diana Vreeland used their faceless figures in her Yves Saint Laurent retrospective at the Met.
In 1985 Pucci was hired by Barney's to develop with interior designer Andrée Putman signature mannequins for their flagship store. The result of this cooperation - a tall, upright, broad-shouldered, androgynous, and metallic-toned Art Deco figure dubbed the "Olympian Goddess" - inspired further mannequins and opened the path to more collaborations.
In the 1990s Pucci worked indeed with Ruben Toledo and Lowell Nesbitt, taking the process of mannequin making to another level.
While celebrating Pucci's 40th anniversary in the business, the exhibition at MAD analyses the intersection between art, design and visual merchandising.
The event features 30 historical pieces created by Pucci - through them it is possible to spot not just several fashion trends, but also important cultural changes in disciplines such as art and design.
Pucci interpreted indeed in his dummies new concepts of beauty, transforming the anonymous forms of the mannequins into dynamic shapes, adding anatomically accurate details or sculpted musculature.
Some mannequins like the ones created with Christy Turlington in 2001 strike yoga and athletic poses, others reflect in their silhouettes social and economic changes.
A few figures can be filed under the "abstract art" or "sculpture" labels: "Birdland" (1988), created with Ruben Toledo, is a dynamical shape inspired by surrealism and Alexander Calder, originally created to display jewellery, but later re-imagined by Pucci as a full-size form for handbags and other accessories; "Olympic Gold" (1989), a muscular male mannequin that challenges ideas of male beauty, was designed by Lowell Nesbitt for the opening of Dayton Hudson's Mall of America store.
The heads of the "Swirley" collection (2000) - one of Pucci's most risk-taking collaborations as the mannequins were characterised by different colours and quirky alien-like elements such as one or three eyes or bizarre cone heads - were drawn from Kenny Scharf's Pop Art paintings; "Ada" (1994) was instead based on one of Maira Kalman's imaginative drawings of eccentric New Yorkers, and featured her signature primary coloured hair and face.
Inspirations for Pucci's in-house collection comes from a variety of sources, including Greek and Roman statues, the performance costumes of the New York Dolls, the music of Philip Glass, the Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake and the legendary jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, or ancient Chinese terra-cotta warriors' poses (the latter integrated in mannequins created for Diane von Furstenberg in 2013).
The organisers - MAD's Chief Curator Lowery Stokes Sims and Barbara Paris Gifford, Curatorial Assistant and project manager - opted for a cross-disciplinary cut for this event and tried to look at the workmanship behind the objects on display by recreating a replica of Pucci's studio.
Pucci's master sculptor and longtime collaborator Michael Evert is in residence at the museum to demonstrate the stages of the mannequin-making process and offer visitors an insight into the creative process, from modelling small maquettes in clay to the rendering of the fiberglass end-product.
There is a work-in-progress atmosphere in this section of the exhibition, with figures drying, body elements and mannequin in various stages of development hanging from hooks or lying on tables, at times looking like disturbing tableaux from a horror film à la Mario Bava.
During the exhibition's run, Evert will conduct live "sittings" and sculpt models of selected fashion celebrities and members of the general public.
There's a bonus in this event for visitors with a passion for jewellery: designers Isabel and Ruben Toledo reinvented the Tiffany Jewelry Gallery as an imaginary moonscape with undulating hills and valleys populated by the half bird/half female mannequin forms created by Ruben for Pucci and donning jewellery pieces from MAD's permanent collection.
In 2004, Pucci created a collection of fuller-bottomed mannequins for Macy's department store. Though the mannequins were only partially answering the consumers' demand to see clothes on realistic female bodies, they were deemed revolutionary as they still added a couple of inches of curves around the hips area, offering in this way a shift in the contours of beauty, and confirming at the same time Pucci's role as an agent of change.
The results of Pucci's collaborative relationships with designers, models, artists and illustrators on display at "The Art of the Mannequin" may not be conventional mass-market fashion forms, but they perfectly showcase the work of a modern artisan who has explored through his practice the relationship governing demand and acceptance between consumer and mannequin, while revolutionising in the process the perceptions of beauty, and elevating mere "visual merchandising" to an art form.
"Ralph Pucci: The Art of the Mannequin", is at the Museum of Arts and Design, 2 Columbus Circle, New York, until 30th August 2015. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with photographs by Antoine Bootz, a foreword by Margaret Russell, editor-in-chief of Architectural Digest, an essay by art historian Emily M. Orr on the history of mannequins, and an interview with Pucci by Jake Yuzna, Director of Public Programs at MAD.
Image credits for this post
1 - 2. Installation photo of 'Ralph Pucci: The Art of the Mannequin' 2015. Photo by Butcher Walsh. Courtesy of the Museum of Arts and Design.
3. Ralph Pucci in His Gallery, 2014. Collection of Ralph Pucci. Photo by Antoine Bootz.
4. Mannequin Sitting Down, 2014. Collection of Ralph Pucci. Photo by Antoine Bootz.
5. Mannequin Torso, Arm and Head in Foundry Finish, 2014. Collection of Ralph Pucci. Photo by Antoine Bootz.
6. The Olympian Goddess, 1986; Andrée Putman, designer; Pucci Mannequins, fabricator; Fiberglass. Collection of Ralph Pucci. Photo by Antoine Bootz.
7. The Form, 1988; Andrée Putman, designer; Pucci Mannequins, fabricator; Fiberglass. Collection of Ralph Pucci. Photo by Antoine Bootz.
8. The Mistress, 1988; Andrée Putman, designer; Pucci Mannequins, fabricator; Fiberglass. Collection of Ralph Pucci. Photo by Antoine Bootz.
9. Birdland, 1988; Ruben Toledo, designer; Pucci Mannequins, fabricator; Fiberglass. Collection of Ralph Pucci. Photo by Antoine Bootz.
10. Olympic Gold, 1989; Lowell Nesbitt, designer; Pucci Mannequins, fabricator; Fiberglass. Collection of Ralph Pucci. Photo by Antoine Bootz.
11. Ada, 1994; Maira Kalman, designer; Pucci Mannequins, fabricator; Fiberglass. Collection of Ralph Pucci. Photo by Antoine Bootz.
12. Veruschka, 1996; Veruschka, designer; Pucci Mannequins, fabricator; Fiberglass. Collection of Ralph Pucci. Photo by Antoine Bootz.
13. Motion2, 2013; Pucci Mannequins; Fiberglass. Collection of Ralph Pucci. Photo by Antoine Bootz.
14. Swirley, 2000; Kenny Scharf, designer; Pucci Mannequins, fabricator; Fiberglass. Collection of Ralph Pucci. Photo by Antoine Bootz.
15. Partially Finished Mannequin Head Revealing Fiberglass Structure, 2014. Collection of Ralph Pucci. Photo by Antoine Bootz.
16. Mannequin Sculpture Being Measured, 2014. Collection of Ralph Pucci. Photo by Antoine Bootz.
17. Mannequin Miniature, 2014. Collection of Ralph Pucci. Photo by Antoine Bootz.
18. Mannequin Molds, 2014. Collection of Ralph Pucci. Photo by Antoine Bootz.
19 - 20. Installation photo of 'Ralph Pucci: The Art of the Mannequin' 2015. Photo by Butcher Walsh. Courtesy of the Museum of Arts and Design.
21 - 22. Installation photo of 'Ralph Pucci: The Art of the Mannequin' 2015. Photo by Butcher Walsh. Courtesy of the Museum of Arts and Design.
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