Adel Rootstein's Lifelike Mannequins Shape the Face of Fashion

For centuries, mannequins have quietly worked to give us an idealistic view of the standard of beauty of the time. Who created these "fake people" that stare silently at us through store windows? Back in the time of Egyptian pharaohs, tailors were using dressmaker forms. In fact, when King Tutankhamen's tomb was opened in 1922, there was a wooden torso placed close to a clothing chest that might have been the world's first dress form, dating from 1350 BC! During the 1700's, 12-18 inch "fashion dolls" with cloth bodies and china heads and hands were used for displaying the latest fashions.

It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution that the full-figured, life-sized mannequin came into existence and use. The modern mannequin's birth can be traced to a particular moment in 1868 when plate glass was invented. Retailers installed windowpanes in their stores and started placing wares near the windows for passers-by to see. The window display was born! At the time, a company called Gems Wax Models supplied dressmaker forms to England, Europe, and the United States. Their wax models became the first store window mannequins. Window shopping suddenly became a new form of entertainment and leisure activity, with people lining up to gaze at new displays. Mannequins drew shoppers in with a silent whisper of "you too can look like this."

These early mannequins were made with the materials available at the time: wax, wood, fabric, iron, papier-mäché, sawdust, and plaster. They were clumsy and heavy, some weighing over 300 pounds! It wasn't until the 1930's, 1940's, and 1950's that mannequins lost weight, thanks to the use of fiberglass.

Enter Adel Rootstein, a successful window dresser and wig maker working in London at a pinnacle time for the fashion world: the late 1950's. She realized that the outdated mannequins being used at the time looked all wrong for displaying the hot new fashions hitting store windows. Adel acted on her vision and went to work designing modern-looking figures with the help of her sculptor friend, John Taylor. Business boomed and Adel launched her own mannequin company in 1959. It was perfect timing, as the world's eyes turned towards London and the Swingin' Sixties fashion era took off.

Even before Twiggy became the icon of the decade, Adel chose her as the model to base a series of six different mannequins on. Twiggy was 14 years old in 1964 when Adel captured her elfish image in mannequin form. With the huge success of her Twiggy mannequins, Adel opened a New York office and a factory in Brooklyn where all the Rootstein mannequins are still produced today. Since then, Rootstein and Co. has been shaping the look of fashion with her mannequins based on real people instead of the stiff, lifeless models of the past.