How will mannequins change in the future? Unlike the early 20th century, the large majority of mannequins we see in shop-fronts are now a standardised 8-10 – much smaller than the size 14 of the average woman. And fashion companies don't show signs of changing their models anytime soon. “Clothes look better on tall, thin, abnormal bodies,” Bloomingdale’s visual director Roya Sullivan has said in a 2007 interview with the Chicago Tribune.

For the most part, today’s commercial mannequins have departed completely from realism or variation, instead having transformed slowly into faceless, block-coloured drones over the last 100 years. “Visual display has turned into a corporate, cookie-cutter kind of reality” says ChadMichael Morrisette, a mannequin collector and director of visual merchandising company CM Squared Designs.

Women, too, have begun to attain more cookie-cutter design through plastic surgery, which mannequins have begun to mirror as well. In Venezuela, where cosmetic procedures are considered the norm (doctors performed 85,000 breast implants in 2014), mannequins adapt to mimic the exaggerated shape that an exceptionally large proportion of the country’s women go under the knife – both legally and illegally – to achieve. Venezuelan mannequin maker Eliezer Álvarez transforms his naturalistic mannequins into big-busted, tiny-waisted, pert-buttocked fiberglass fantasies, which become the standard in most department stores. Is this a case of art imitating life, or life imitating art? “The transformation has been both of the woman and of the mannequin”, Álvarez’s wife and business partner explains.