Feeling a bit weirded out

 Retail display fixtures definitely can slide over into totally weird and creepy pretty quickly. I've been wandering around the intertubes searching for clothing display equipment for the museum. We have a distinct lack of decent mannequins and other fixtures for exhibits that involve clothing of any sort. 

We have a couple torsos, including two dudes that have heads and arms but stop at about crotch level, which means pants are going to hang kind of loose on them. We have one complete female mannequin (head and torso, arms, and legs -- the top half and bottom join at the waist) but she's in sad shape with a smashed skull (sort of taped together and hidden with a wig when she's used) and a mangled arm. And we have a couple dress maker's dummies. When we did a World War I exhibit we resorted to using a rather busty dressmaker's dummy to display a man's uniform -- we just put it on the dummy backwards and positioned it so the lumps in its back weren't too noticeable. 

I have been pricing good mannequins for awhile now. They're not cheap. If we went all out and ordered from a museum supplies catalog there'd be a comma in the price tag for just one mannequin. The only way we'll ever order a museum quality conservation mannequin will be when/if the museum gets a very generous grant for mounting an exhibit and finds itself desperate to spend it all. Even an ordinary store display mannequin can cost several hundred dollars. 

Anyway, knowing actual mannequins currently qualify as fantasy items, I went searching for shaped hangers, something that I could hang a uniform on and then display on a wall. The ideal hanger would be shaped enough to fill out the uniform jacket a bit instead of it just laying flat as well as having rounded shoulders to prevent creases forming in the material. 

You know, there really is a remarkable variety of molded plastic body parts out there. I did find the torso hangers I was looking for. They come in a variety of genders and age ranges -- you can get flat-back children, women, men. And they're cheap, which is good. I ordered four dudes, which means I can do at least two drum corps uniforms, maybe three, and then will use the fourth one to add a Vietnam era U.S. military jacket to the military exhibit.   

I did step away, figuratively speaking, from the search with just one question: why was there such a huge variety of men's "swimsuit" forms? There were a gazillion, all with a bulge to indicate that yes, this particular piece of molded plastic is male. And they were like snowflakes. When it came to the package, no two were alike. Some of the plastic men were obviously extremely well endowed; others must have jumped into a very cold lake. It was weird. None, however, resembled a piece of a Ken doll. 

I also found myself remembering an old Toivo and Eino joke ("the potato goes in front"), but ethnic humor is frowned upon these days.