Anonymous is in fashion these days

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Thursday, January 01, 2004

Anonymous is in fashion these days

Carrie is a thoughtful redhead with large eyes and a slender unclothed body, which she covers shyly with her arms. She's fashion's latest It girl.

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Carrie is a thoughtful redhead with large eyes and a slender unclothed body, which she covers shyly with her arms. She's fashion's latest It girl.

Would you buy clothes from someone like this?

Carrie is in fact the fiberglass creation of Dwight Critchfield, the creative director of Goldsmith Inc. They're the New York makers of mannequins �� manmade models. And Carrie is a new symbol of modernity. She showed off her attractions, last week at StoreXpo, a three-day trade show in Manhattan. It pulls in artists who do shop windows and displays from stores around the US.

The shapes of mannequin change subtly over time. In the 1930s, mannequins without heads were the rage. These gave way in the '40s and '50s to long-necked girls with polished nails and delicate hairstyles. In the '60s, in recognition of the dominant youth culture, store dummies assumed as skinny look.

By the mid-70s and early '80s, fiberglass boys and girls gave way to dummy adults, their comparatively fleshy contours and rippling muscles reflected the gym-toned bodies of the day. Some borrowed their features from the runway stars of the day.

Still, in the last year or so, there is a renewed attraction to anonymity. Following a trend of the '90s, their creators have taken abstraction to extremes: they have eliminated facial features and, in some cases, substituted a spike for a head. For the most part, though, the most compelling mannequins reflect modern reality.

"Mannequins today look stretched out a bit more," said Ralph Pucci, owner of a mannequin company in New York . Indeed, they can reach as high as 1.8 metres, compared with about 1.74 metres a half-dozen years ago.

And some modern trends also affect them. Like the modern metrosexual, "The male ones don't look as if they spend all their time body building," Pucci said.

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