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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This is the second part of “Plastic Girls,” a forty-year project by the Italian photographer Roberto Bigano documenting mannequins. All the pictures were taken in the United States from 1982 to 1988, mainly with a 4×5 view camera.
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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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