Mannequins in Venezuela are being designed with oversized bust lines, mirroring a trend in the country of Venezuelan women using plastic surgery to transform their bodies.
Eliezer Alvarez, a local mannequin manufacturer, told the New York Times that he has created the kind of woman he thought the public wanted – one with a bulging bosom and cantilevered buttocks, a wasp waist and long legs, a fiberglass fantasy, Venezuelan style.
“The shape was augmented,” wrote the Times, “and so were sales. Now his mannequins, and others like them, have become the standard in stores across Venezuela, serving as an exaggerated, sometimes polarizing, vision of the female form that calls out from the doorways of tiny shops selling cheap clothes to working-class women and the display windows of fancy boutiques in multilevel shopping malls.”
The Times said cosmetic procedures are so fashionable in Venezuela that a woman with implants is often casually referred to as “an operated woman.” Women freely talk about their surgeries, and mannequin makers jokingly refer to the creations as being “operated” as well.
Álvarez’s wife and business partner, Nereida Corro, calls her best-selling mannequin, with its inflated proportions, the “normal” model.
The jump in sales provided by the large-busted mannequins allowed Corro and Álvarez to build a new workshop this year, where they are made by hand in what the Times called “a surprisingly low-tech process.”
“Dozens of partly finished mannequins stood in neat rows, like silent robots with overblown chests, taking the exaggerated female aesthetic that predominates here and pushing it to its furthest limits.
“On a recent day, about a dozen people were at work. Some applied a thin coating of a brown pasty resin and fiberglass strips inside molds, left it to dry and then pried out the artificial torsos, arms, and the fronts and backs of plastic bodies. Others glued the mannequin parts together, spray-painted them or set finished mannequins ready for delivery in the back of a pickup truck, with the words ‘Jesus is my peace’ written in large letters on the windshield.”