Mannequins designed not to offend

quote:

---

Alexandra Waldman used to hate shopping. As a plus-size woman, not only did she have to go to some far-hidden corner of the department stores on Fifth Avenue to find clothes that fit her — far away from the contemporary, so-called “normal” fashions — but she had to settle for matronly items shown on bulky, unattractive mannequins. “It was a little painful to look at them,” Waldman, a former fashion journalist and finance marketer, tells The Post of the mannequins. “They were ham-fisted in the way you would imagine a Soviet wrestler at the Olympics to look: massive, beefy, instantly not associated with youth. It was everything that you dread with a modern plus-size woman.”

---

quote:

---

In 2015, Waldman and her friend Polina Veksler launched the minimalist label Universal Standard, which serves sizes 10 to 28, and, in late 2017, the mannequin maker Ralph Pucci approached the pair about collaborating on a new line of body-positive models. Now, when Universal Standard — which sells directly to consumers online — holds pop-up shops throughout the country, they tote their specially-made Pucci figures with them.

---

quote:

---

Last month, the youthful fast-fashion label Missguided debuted an array of real-girl mannequins, featuring stretch marks, freckles and even the skin condition vitiligo, which causes patches of skin to lose their pigmentation.

---