THE FOCUS ON FASHION in Weimar culture brings up numerous direct and indirect references to the mannequin — as living person or inanimate female body — who displayed the latest styles in all kinds of venues: department stores, shop windows, fashion shows, and tea parties. One person looking at the Berlin mannequin was the inquisitive flâneur. In a 1929 picture story entitled “Eine gefährliche Straße” (A Dangerous Street), published in Das Illustrierte Blatt (Otto Umber provided the photographs), Franz Hessel voiced the common mixture of fascination and anxiety triggered by the sight of dummies in the display windows. Walking down a Berlin street not far from the Spittelmarkt, where numerous mannequin factories had their storefronts, he described the “stylized products of display-window artistry” as “the spooky beauties” that appeared in their “thousands all over Germany and around the world in order to demonstrate to us how to wear shirts, dresses, and hats.” Indeed, by the end of the 1920s the manufacture of mannequins, as well as fashion in general, was a flourishing business in Germany. There were over a dozen large mannequin factories in Berlin alone, where the thriving Konfektion industry counted close to 800 companies and was making huge profits in domestic and international sales.

As he observed the unprecedented proliferation of mannequins in Berlin shop windows, Hessel bemoaned nostalgically the departure of the old-fashioned, realistic wax dummies that resembled “Cleopatra and Gretchen at once.” Confronted with the modern dummies, he was frightened by their stylized expressions, their uniform faces, and their “gazes,” in which the male observer could only read such human character traits as coldness, corruptness, impertinence, and haughtiness. With his typical provocative irony he concluded: “Their pouted lips challenge us, and they peek at us with narrow eyes from which the gaze oozes like poison…. All of them despise us men terribly. They do not wonder what we imagine as we look at them; they simply see through us.”

The image of the mannequin in Hessel's essay is paradigmatic of the hesitancy with which the revolutionary changes in appearance of the “real” Weimar woman — her body, her clothes, and her prominent presence in the public spaces of the city — were received by the male public.