Displaying Designs

One of the applications for the Mini-Mes described in Fashion & Costume Design in Quarter Scale is to display a design or design collection. Consider a wedding dress. A fair amount of time, money, and effort is expended to create a wedding dress. But it is "displayed" for less than a day and then put in storage. Photographs could be used to display the wedding dress. But a photograph is not nearly as effective as being able to see the design in three dimensions. On the other hand, a quarter-scale version of a wedding dress can be displayed whenever, wherever, and as long as desired.

The photo below shows some of the Mini-Mes included in Fashion & Costume Design in Quarter Scale. The Mini-Mes are very light at around 2 ounces and yet they are sturdy so they could easily be shipped anywhere.

The first time I taught design was in a Theatre Costume and Makeup class back in the 70s. I was rather passionate about sharing the evolution of the design of garments over the centuries. But I could not figure out how to make a scaled down mannequin. I ended up doing black and white line drawings on a roll of paper that was about 3 feet by 15. Now with the Mini-Mes that type of display could be done.

At the turn of the century I was introduced to quarter-scale fashion dolls. Because the dolls were carefully reproduced to a high quality standard for duplicating the body shapes, I got involved with creating and selling patterns for them. I created the New York store front in the picture above to display my various designs at a convention for fashion dolls. It was limiting because the fashion dolls cost over $100 each so I was not able to display all my designs. But with Mini-Mes which can be made for under $5.00 I could have displayed all my designs.

It is interesting to note that the House of Dior used a scaled down version of their Paris headquarters during the pandemic when they released the quarter-scale mannequins to introduce the haute couture designs of their Autumn/Winter 2020-2021 collection. And of course the historic Theatre de la Mode exhibit by the French fashion industry toured Europe and the United States from 1945 to 1946 after World War II with 237 mannequins.