Plastic Girls / Mannequins Archive (1977–2025)

A photographic study of shop-window mannequins, recognized as an archive only decades later.

The Plastic Girls / Mannequins Archive (1976–2025) brings together one of the most extensive photographic studies devoted to the visual culture of shop-window mannequins. Begun in 1976 and continued intermittently over almost five decades, this body of work was not conceived as a project at the time it was photographed. Its coherence only emerged decades later, when high-quality digitization and systematic organization made it possible to view the material as a continuous archive rather than as isolated images.

Seen retrospectively, the archive documents not only the changing forms, materials, and manufacturing styles of mannequins, but also the evolving urban landscapes, retail environments, and cultural attitudes reflected in their design. What originally appeared as everyday observations gradually revealed themselves as a long-term visual record of how artificial bodies entered public space and absorbed shifting ideas of femininity, display, and consumption.

Unlike traditional fashion or street photography, this archive approaches mannequins as cultural artifacts — objects that embody the aesthetics, aspirations, and anxieties of their time. Their poses, expressions, gestures, and surface treatments mirror changes in beauty ideals, gender representation, fabrication technologies, and retail psychology. From the fibreglass figures of the late 1970s to the hyper-realistic silicone models of the 21st century, these images reveal how mannequins became silent storytellers of modern consumer culture.

Available Chapters

• Plastic Girls: 50 Years of Artificial Beauty — A long-term photographic study of window mannequins as cultural artifacts of their time.

• Plastic Girls — The Age of Plastic Innocence (1978–1980) — Early Works – Shop-window mannequins before the rise of performative display.

• American Mannequins — Journey into Hyperreality (1982–1988)— Artificial bodies and performative realism in American retail display.

• Plastic Girls — Glamour, Aggression, and Display (1980–1997) — A shared escalation toward excess, beyond style, geography, or chronology.

• Spain (1997) — Glamorous Brides — Ritual, spectacle, and artificial femininity in Andalusian display culture.

All photographs were taken by Roberto Bigano. The archive’s unity is the result of retrospective recognition, not prior intent. The same disciplined documentary approach — clarity, precision, material awareness — also defines other Ikonographia collections, including the Bugatti Automobili Archive and the NYC Art Deco Interiors Archive.

“I had been photographing mannequins for decades before realizing that I was building an archive. Only years later, while digitizing negatives at high resolution and placing images side by side, did the continuity become evident. What had seemed incidental revealed itself as a coherent visual history.”

Beyond mannequin design, the archive also captures the urban and commercial contexts in which these figures appear. Reflections, street scenes, passing silhouettes, seasonal changes, and shifting retail districts form a layered environmental record embedded in the photographs. The result is not only a study of mannequins, but a parallel portrait of cities, economies, and visual habits across nearly fifty years.

This archive continues to grow — not as a reconstruction of the past, but as an ongoing act of interpretation, made possible by distance, time, and renewed attention.