Plastic Girls: 50 Years of Artificial Beauty introduces a newly re-edited and expanded view of Roberto Bigano’s long-term photographic study of shop-window mannequins.
This featured page brings together three fully restyled chapters and reframes them as a coherent visual archive, examining artificial femininity and commercial display as cultural artifacts across nearly five decades.
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A complete visual and iconographic study of the Chanin Building grilles (1929), combining new photographic documentation with historical analysis.
The project focuses on René Chambellan’s sculptural program and decodes The City of Opportunity as a symbolic narrative embedded in the building’s metalwork—where Art Deco ornament becomes a language of ambition, labor, and urban identity in late-1920s New York.
This chapter documents the earliest phase of the Plastic Girls archive, focusing on shop-window mannequins before the rise of performative display. Photographed between 1977 and 1980, these figures are defined by restraint: balanced poses, controlled gestures, and a visual language centered on stillness rather than spectacle. Seen today, they mark the final moment of an “innocent” artificial body, quietly entering public space before excess, dramatization, and theatrical identity took hold.
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