Back before the club closed its doors forevermore, I sat on the
bleacher-like steps of the Opium Garden in South Beach, Miami, and
watched a breakdancer in a strategically torn t-shirt. Her athletic
body gyrated; she pop-locked, downrocked and piked and then she sat
down next to me, another girl in baggy pants, sneakers and a hat. We
watched the other action on the dance floor for a few minutes as the music kept thumping. Nearly all of the women pouting to
the beat shimmied in miniskirts, break-neck stilettos and band-aid tops, with breasts
that should have been bouncing but instead
remained firmly bolted in place. The b-girl leaned over and shouted
over the thumps: “Welcome to Miami, where you’re not allowed to live
unless you’ve got fake tits and dick-suckin’ lips.” Of course, that was
a vulgar way to put it, the stereotype of body-conscious South Beach,
but there it was.
This year, the closed club a victim of
noise complaints and rising rents, I ambled down Lincoln Mall Road in
search of a gelato. Before I got to the gelato, there it was again.
Of
course, it’s possible or even probable that these mannequins graced
Miami’s shop windows before this year and I just didn’t notice them;
I’m not sure. Anyway, I don’t know what to think about these real fake
ladies. Suddenly walking down Lincoln Mall Road bore a surreal
similarity to traversing yesteryear's gauntlet of sex workers in the
storefronts of Amsterdam's Red Light district.
Those
Miami mannequins displays say more about the normalization of cosmetic
surgery in our culture than most anything I can write about it, I
think. For women in places like South Beach and Los Angeles, the question of whether or not to go under the knife is moot; the question is no longer “Should I get surgery?” That we should get surgery is taken for granted. Instead, the fundamental question has become “Where should I get which surgery?”
The
mannequins also beg some questions about the aspirational nature of
window shopping. It could be argued that the mannequins represent the
body type of the average South Beach resident more than the traditional
clothes-hanger-skinny mannequin, and thus give a more realistic idea of
how the merchandise would fit potential customers. It could also be
argued that heroine-chic physiques of traditional mannequins modeled
equally unnatural body types, or that they enforced a standard of
homogeneity for the female form so the busty new gals provide some
welcome variety, at least. While that’s possible, I also wonder how
much these mannequins now commodify the body as the items for sale
versus the clothing as the items for sale. When we’re window shopping,
are we supposed to covet the merchandise or the bodies on display?

There
seems to be a sort of chicken and egg element to the issue as well.
Are mannequins like these a result of the body commodification and
normalization of cosmetic surgery in our culture, or a cause of them?