The Fragmented Fashion Body: Mannequins and the Paris Exposition Internationale, 1937
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mannequins are pivotal to the creation and communication of meaning in fashion display.Despite changes in materials and design, throughout much of their history mannequins have perpetuated a standardized, restrictive, and harmful ideal of the fashion body.This article contributes to the limited scholarship on mannequins by analyzing an unusual example of modern mannequin design: the figures debuted in the Pavillon de l'Élégance at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, held in Paris in 1937.With a lack of facial features, anatomically impossible proportions, and poses suggestive of tension and terror, these mannequins clearly depart from conventions of bodily containment and serene elegance.This vision of the fashion body belongs to a broader cultural preoccupation with fragmentation seen in the arts and visual culture.It also materializes developing psychoanalytic ideas of fragmentation and subjectivity, namely those put forth in Jacques Lacan's theory of the mirror stage (1936).The fragile and fragmented mannequins reflect a body and associated model of subjectivity rooted in instability.As such, they counter assumptions that fashion provides a means to stabilize the body and subjectivity.Drawing on original archival research and methods of art history, this article presents these unconventional mannequins as reflections of their unique historical and cultural conditions, when the traumas of recent war intersected with the foreboding premonition of the horrors that would soon unfold.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".