Retailers Think Mannequins With Tattoos Will Get You to Pony Up at the Register

When you go shopping, you can usually count on two things: bad lighting in the dressing room and weird mannequins on display. Whether the figures come with no noggin or, as I saw in one store this past weekend, the skulls look like they're straight from a Saturday Night Live Coneheads skit, retailers rely on them to give us a little aspirational shove toward the cash register. With brick-and-mortar stores battling their online counterparts for what’s in your wallet, stores are revamping (and even adding) mannequins to catch your eye.

If you shop at high-end stores, you’re seeing some serious mannequin shenanigans. At Christian Dior boutiques, reports The Wall Street Journal, the figures wear the latest in makeup and nail polish trends. The mannequins’ eyes, lips, and fingernails are magnetic, enabling stores to easily swap out a daytime casual look for an evening-friendly smoky eye—whatever will steer customers toward purchasing. Bergdorf Goodman now has a set of male figurines that come with ultrahip body ink. Apparently, a guy with a tattoo will believe the mannequin is just like him and then snap up the outfit on display.

Big box stores have traditionally shied away from using mannequins—just one of the figures can cost $300 to $900, too much for fairly low-cost, high-volume retailers. But given competition for consumer dollars, especially from vendors like Amazon, walk-in stores are adding and revamping mannequins. In January, for the first time ever, Target put mannequins in some of its stores.

Buyers "are looking for a little more help with 'how do I really pull this off?' " Target spokesperson Joshua Thomas recently told the Journal. If a woman “needs a cute outfit to wear to a picnic on Saturday and she has 10 minutes to get it, [mannequins are] time saving in that respect, helping them identify items and inspiring them to purchase."

For example, even if cargo capri pants on a mannequin look awful on nearly everyone in real life (Project Runway adviser and style king Tim Gunn said so, folks), if we see that those capris look cute on someone—even if it’s a mannequin—maybe we’ll think the problem is us. After all, advertisers and retailers have long relied on body shaming to motivate us to purchase products, and using the fiberglass and plastic figures is certainly a part of that. The result? We'll think we just need to buy the whole ensemble, and then we'll look as good as the mannequin.

All these mannequin fluctuations don’t change the simple fact that the typical American woman wears a size 12. The average store mannequin? She’s a svelte size 4. If stores really want to move more clothing and products, how about they take a page from the "Real Beauty" campaign and have mannequin manufacturers create figures of a variety of body types and sizes. After all, if the figure actually looks like me, and I can see that the cargo capri pants look fantastic on it, maybe I'll even ignore Gunn's advice.