Mannequin Madness is the kitschy go-to shop you didn’t know you needed—and now that you have thought about it, why wouldn’t you need a mannequin?
There’s an eco-friendly aspect to these gifts, too. Owner and founder Judi Henderson recycles an average of one million pounds of mannequins a year; the Black-owned, woman-owned business is certainly practicing sustainability on a human scale (ha…).
Mannequins are grouped into nearly 20 categories, including ghost (it lets the garment appear to be floating), African American, egghead (no features), headless, clear (who knew?), realistic, pregnant and reclining, among others. Wondering how much such a decorative game changer would set you back? Pricing ranges from $280 to $717 for an articulated figure (meaning, you can move its limbs just like one of those wooden art figures). Prices are cheaper if you purchase a used mannequin.
If you can’t commit to a full mannequin, you can purchase a torso or your favorite appendage. Henderson’s website is a marvel to peruse. There’s a tab that just reads “body parts” and we admit to a sixth grade snicker when clicking on the link titled “butts.” The more you look—you’ll see mannequins riding bikes, running, doing yoga poses, looking down at their pregnant bellies—the more they seem somewhat alive. They appear to be carrying out their own, varied lives, and there’s something hypnotic about scrolling past their images.
Henderson welcomes donations of mannequins—stores often let them go when their fashions change (just as the clothes they wear also change), when a store goes bankrupt or when the mannequin is damaged. A retail mannequin’s “lifespan” is about seven years. Henderson resells these mannequins, keeping them out of the landfill. In the past, she’s absorbed discards from American Apparel and Sears. She’s also saving them from being “recycled”; if they’re not resold, they will sometimes be put into a grinder and then used for fuel or cement, which requires burning—which may release toxic fumes in the process, and kind of offsets the whole recycling aspect.
So who are her customers? Artists including Burning Man creators, people making Halloween displays or holiday trees, dressmakers, crafters with inventive uses for the figures, cosplayers who want a structurally safe way to store an expensive costume when not wearing it and even BDSM folks who buy them to practice rope tying techniques like Shibari.
Henderson says Halloween and Burning Man are the two events where the demand for mannequin body parts (no matter how distressed) is the highest. She says people often use mannequin legs to portray the witch from the Wizard of Oz, and photos on her company’s Pinterest board show legs wearing striped stockings and Dorothy’s red shoes sprouting out of porch planters. Full body mannequins are also artfully used, such as one stationed on a staircase landing, all in white gauze with a lantern next to her.
She says that she has a significant group of collectors who are gay men who own 30 mannequins or more. “They display [them] in their home and dress them up in different clothing—often designer clothing—as if they are playing with life sized Barbie Dolls. Many of there were former visual merchandisers, so they are ‘bringing their work home.’”
Mannequin Madness is just across the bay in Oakland, in an old cotton mill in the Jingletown neighborhood. Jingletown carries that name because of millworkers’ habit of jingling coins in their pockets on payday to show off their earnings, lore says. Another historical source adds that immigrant laborers did not trust banks, and so kept all their money in their pockets—their children, who had not experienced poverty, laughed at the quaint custom and the term Jingletown was born. It’s an important historical neighborhood—and the California Cotton Mills once ran operations out of 20 to 30 buildings here, one of which is now where Mannequin Madness resides. Between 1915 and ’28, the mills produced the most varied products of any cotton mills in the U.S., according to Beth Bagwell's book Oakland, Story of a City. The neighborhood was also once a big canning area, including for Del Monte, and author Jack London lived here. (I think he would probably stop by the store if he was alive and write an updated novel, The Call of the Mannequin.)
This time of year our heads are turned towards shopping, and if you can’t think of a worthy recipient for a mannequin or body parts, you might want to support this business by taking a flower crown holiday class (Henderson is wearing one in the photo above). With entirely sustainable materials like pine cones and poinsettias, you can design a beautiful and memorable headdress to wear to SantaCon (where this year Henderson is a leading coordinator) or your office’s ugly sweater party. You can come to Jingletown for the class or, with a minimum of 10 people, have a mobile one brought to your school, library, church or community center. The cost is $60 adults and $45 children for both versions; if the event is more than 25 miles from zip code 94610, a $120 transportation fee applies. You can also create a dress form holiday tree!
