Diggin' through a big pile of midcentury, tabloid style adult magazines, and found this great little article in the December 1949 issue of HIT! magazine. Packed with lovely photos about vintage mannequins (my favorite era of mannies), including the big business practice / making of 'em. I've never heard of this mag before either, but will have more heavenly highlights from it later this month too, --do stay plastered!
5 comments:
My aunt actually owned a mannequin factory. If you ever went into one of the Warner Brothers or Universal Studios stores while they still existed, you probably saw their work.
Would love to see some pix or hear more about this sometime
It is always interesting to see the methods and techniques of making items we see in the world around us that we take for granted.
Mannequin making hasn't changed much over the decades, but the detail Mr. Forsberg puts into his creation is a level of craftsmanship that has almost disappeared in today's do it on the cheap world of today.
Sculptor Aston Forsberg did some sculptures in his native Sweden so his work on Mannequins was either early in his career or was a side hustle before side hustles were a thing. I had no luck in finding any information on Miss Gudrun Melander.
And once again, thanks for sharing this magazine with us, it is always a treat to see magazines from the past.
I love how absolutely manual the mannequin process is. From actually sculpting it, to the reverse mold, to molding, to painting, all skilled craftsmen doing their job.
And no men's magazine could stay away from a row of headless nude female torsos. That's men's adventure magazine 101, right there!
I also like how everybody is smoking on the job!
I've definitely said this before, but these grainy black and white newsprint pix of disarticulated mannequin parts always hits me as an unusually guilt-free way to evoke atrocity. I mean, I can get the same frisson of horror from flipping through a Hans Bellmer book, but that damns me in a way that enjoying this act of creation does not. So thanks for that!
I swear I've seen the woman billed here as Godrun Melander before (assuming that's her pictured modeling). I'm heading back into the Olga's House of Shame archives till I figure this one out!
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