So New Zealand women are not having a bar of skinny mannequins. Our Scottish sisters are with us on this one, and American women, too. In ditching their bony dollies in response to a public outcry, Kiwi chain Glassons is merely following in the footsteps of dirt-cheap retail giant Primark, which pulled a similarly starved-looking mannequin from one of its shops in Glasgow in July after a customer complained. Two months earlier, fancy knickers brand La Perla had to yank an emaciated-looking dummy from the front window of one of its New York stores. Although it's deeply depressing that these things are getting made in the first place, it's great to see social networks giving customers a voice they have not had before.
In all three of the above cases, it was women shopping who tweeted photos of the skinny mannequins. Their tweets were retweeted, and in short order within a matter of hours, in the case of La Perla, the displays were taken down.
Used to be the only thing you could do was tell your friends to steer clear when something outrageous happened to you in a store. Now, if you don't like what a business is doing, you can engage with it directly simply by picking up your phone. That voice is important, because skinny mannequins haven't come out of nowhere. They're reflective of the culture we live in, and what its beauty ideals are. Those ideals come from the culture. Even though sometimes it feels like they're being handed down from on high, they're not. We're culture generators, as much as culture consumers, even if all we're doing is buying clothes and wearing them.
I have a lot of respect for Denise L'Estrange-Corbet, but in choosing to focus on the size aspect of the Glassons row - whether clothes look better on thin people - she's missing the point of the stoush. This is not about size, it's about power.
Glassons is a mass-market retailer, it's not selling haute couture. It'll sell you clothes at a low price point, and give you variety; Armani it isn't. There's no artistic vision on the line. Therefore, it's the consumer who has the power here. That's you and me, and anyone else who has ever bought a top in Glassons, or a cheap bikini or a sundress or a pair of canvas shoes.
