Where Did The Term Mannequin Come From?

One of the greatest friends of tailors and designers everywhere is the humble mannequin, and designer dummies have been around for at least 600 years.

The term itself, as well as the related term manikin, comes from the 16th-century flemish word "manneken", which literally translates to “little man”.

Before the creation of the mannequin form we are most familiar with, two other model types were often used, known as dress forms and fashion dolls.

Dress forms are models of the torso much like a lot of tailor’s dummies that are used today, which allows tailors to create fits for clothing as they are being designed or put together.

They were often designed with particular people in mind, such as queens and noblewomen, and they allow for garments to be specially tailored to fit these people.

Fashion dolls, on the other hand, sometimes known as Pandora Dolls “milliners’ mannequins”, were much smaller models that were used to show particular fashions available in a shop window, and were also used by the royal courts of Europe.

The idea is that if the idea of a fashion could not be depicted in a painting or adequately described to a tailor, a fashion doll could be sent depicting the desired fashion for them to create a life-sized version.

As they were much cheaper to create and send across borders, they quickly caught on amongst tailors and fashion merchants, being displayed in shop windows in the same way a life-sized mannequin would be today.

Eventually, the small-sized dolls would fall out of fashion due to three factors. The first was a ban by Napoleon I, who believed they could be used to smuggle secrets.

As well as this, the rise of the fashion magazine Cabinet des Modes meant that the dolls were more expensive than a magazine at showcasing the latest trends.

Finally, life-sized mannequins were starting to be made in France, first out of papier-mâché and then later out of wax.