Shoe Surrealism — Valentino Flagship Store, 654 Madison Avenue, NYC, 2024

Between 1977 and 1980, shop-window mannequins across Europe were defined by restraint. Controlled gestures, neutral composure, bodies designed to present clothing, not perform identity. Display had not yet become theatre. These images are the beginning of a record that only revealed its full coherence decades later. They were not made as a project. They were made by instinct — the kind that precedes understanding by decades. The Age of Plastic Innocence is the only chapter in the Plastic Girls project shot entirely in black and white.

Core contents:

Northern Europe — Restraint and Invention, 1978–1980

Germany, Scandinavia, Finland. Cities where display was precise, considered, and untheatrical — each in its own way. The windows showed what the culture valued: in Germany, controlled composure and the studied use of accessories; in Scandinavia, a restraint that the northern light made its own. Invention appeared where least expected — a headdress of flowers and feathers in a fabric store in Braunschweig, a retro figure horizontal in a vintage boutique in Stockholm's Gamla Stan.

West Berlin — Avant-Garde and Contrast

West Berlin's shop windows reflected the city's unique cultural position: an island of capitalist abundance surrounded by the Eastern Bloc — kept alive by federal subsidies that turned it into a magnet for artists, designers, and anyone willing to live on the edge of the world.

The City in February 1980 was electric. Avant-garde boutiques staged mannequins as sculptural provocations. Traditional department stores maintained conservative elegance. A few kilometres away, across the Wall, East Berlin shop windows presented a different world: modest clothing, limited materials, the female figure defined by role, not desire. Five days, hundreds of images — mannequins one thread among many in a city that demanded sustained attention. What is presented here is the edit: the moments when the shop window concentrated everything the city was saying about itself.

London — Elegance and Tradition

London's Knightsbridge, Regent Street, and Oxford Street presented mannequins as bearers of restrained sophistication. Poised figures in carefully coordinated ensembles embodied British retail tradition — composure, quality, and understated aspiration. These displays captured the final moment before globalized retail homogenized urban window culture.

This Series is part of:

Plastic Girls — 50 Years of Artificial Beauty

A long-term photographic study of window mannequins as cultural artifacts of their time, by Roberto Bigano.
Created over nearly fifty years, the Plastic Girls project examines how artificial female bodies were designed and displayed in public space, reflecting changing ideals of beauty, femininity, desire, and social aspiration. Seen as a continuous sequence, the series reveals how consumer culture repeatedly shaped — and reshaped — the representation of the female form.

All photographs in this project were taken from the street, through shop-window glass, without special access or permissions. Nothing is staged or arranged for the camera: the images record what is openly visible yet rarely observed with sustained attention.

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.