Big breasts for dummies

Mannequins with giant bazooms are busting out in shop windows from coast to coast. More than just garment racks, they are a mirror of current beauty and fashion.

By Wendy Paris

Read more: Plastic Surgery, Style, Life

Jan. 3, 2007 | I was in Miami in October, strolling past the retail shops on Collins Avenue in South Beach, when I saw two mannequins in a store window that caused me to stop and stare. I wasn't the only one staring. The mannequins -- one wearing a tight white bikini and the other a flirty miniskirt and a T-shirt tied at the waist -- were modeled after women who'd had breast augmentation surgery and gone in for DDDD cups. These buxom Fiberglas beauties weren't in a head shop or an adult video store, but rather at Deco Denim, a family-owned Miami retail group specializing in brand-name denim and casual wear.

I've never been one to complain about our culture's obsession with beauty, to worry that shows like "Extreme Makeover" normalize plastic surgery in an already looks-focused society. You won't hear me ranting against Botox treatments at the mall. "Which mall?" is more likely my response, "And how much does it cost?" But these mannequins with their massive chests crossed the line from a little harmless obsession with appearance to a society run amok.

I grabbed my husband's hand and jerked him to a stop in front of the store. "Look at that!" I demanded. He was already looking. I was suddenly conscious of my own chest and its relative lack of girth. It's easy to feel physically inadequate in South Beach, to see oneself as too short or too fat or too insufficiently swathed in lime green Spandex. Perhaps mannequins with boob jobs were just a South Beach thing?

Not so. When I returned to Manhattan, I noticed two of the top-heavy models in the window at Mystique Boutique, a trend-focused, budget clothing store in SoHo. I did a quick Internet search and turned up a dozen sites selling the super-busty mannequins -- generally Chinese imports costing as little as $150, about a tenth the cost of top-of-the-line mannequins sold today. I gaped at "Olivia" (40 inches/25 inches/37 inches) and "Marie" (40.5 inches/24.5 inches/36.5 inches), introduced in 2005 on Washington state's MannequinStore.com. I gawked at the equally well-endowed "Mary" on StudioRox.com, the Web site of a New York mannequin manufacturer and importer. I saw a "Full Size Realistic Sexy Standing Female Mannequin" -- also named "Mary" -- for $289.99 on the Los Angeles site DisplayImporter.com.

The mannequins were popular in South Beach. Even on those flashy South Florida streets, pedestrians and motorists stop daily to photograph the models at Deco Denim, store manager Amos Cohen told me. Then they enter the store. "This morning a customer bought a swimsuit from the mannequin," he said. "It looks good on the mannequin. The customer had a big top, too, so it looked very nice."

Dress dummies and mannequins have existed in some form since the time of the pharaohs, but it wasn't until the turn of the last century, with the rise of the "designed" department store window, that they were transformed from shapeless props into realistic figures, and became a fixture of fashion retailing. I knew a mannequin's role in life was to help a retailer sell more clothes, and in recent years, help sell a retailer's brand identity as well. But typically they are supposed to be slim and lithe, aspirational, the plastic version of twiggy fashion models. Or so I thought. "Mannequins are considered the ideal beauty of our time," said Marie Davis, editor in chief of FashionWindows.com, an online magazine for fashion and visual merchandising. "But they're also political. Whatever is happening in the world is also happening in the mannequins. They have to reflect society or people won't buy the clothes."

Oh, great. I hate the idea that a surgically achieved, über-chesty look is an ideal for anyone -- beyond participants at an exotic dancer convention. After all, the average size of the American female chest is 34B. And while there were about 330,000 breast augmentation surgeries done in the U.S. last year, that's not a majority of shoppers. Even with the FDA's recent re-approval of the appealingly squishy silicone implants, women with breast jobs are not really a large enough market to warrant their own fashions. At least not yet. With more mannequins with super-bazoombas showing up in stores, how long will it be before more women are asking, "How much is that chest in the window?"

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New York City is the center of the American mannequin industry. While most showrooms are located south of Midtown, on West 25th and 26th streets, the outer boroughs are home to an ever-growing cadre of companies offering cheap Asian imports, like Rox Studio. On a sunny Friday in late November, I took the F train to the end of the line to visit Rox, the birthplace, I had heard, of the endowed mannequins.

After a 15-minute walk through a litter-strewn, semi-residential area of Queens, I came to the Rox Studio showroom and warehouse, located in a row of cement-block buildings called Jamaica Industrial Park. Across the street, laundry hung on a line behind a narrow brick house. Sounds of manufacturing -- drilling, hammering and the churning of a giant cement mixer -- rang out across the neighborhood. On a metal door painted gray, a piece of paper flapped in the wind, attached by a piece of strapping tape. "Main Entrance," it said.

Inside Rox Studio were a handful of windowless offices with flat gray carpet and low ceilings, connected to a huge warehouse. Fifty slender mannequins and three hyper-buxom models stood around a large, rectangular showroom in various states of undress. I walked over to the somewhat slutty-looking "Jessica," who was naked except for a wig of ash blond corkscrew curls and a cigarette hanging from her mouth. She stood next to the red-haired, mega-breasted "Anna," and the similarly huge, African-American "Anita." In a smaller photo room, the chesty "Mary" stood naked and wigless. Her high, round breasts came up to my collarbone. They were bigger than her face, the nipples painted Bazooka bubblegum pink.

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