I was at the goodwill store last week and found a cache of German marketing magazines from the 1980’s and early 1990’s.
One that really intrigued me was a magazine that focused on mannequins. Flipping through these forgotten pages was a pretty surreal experience, in the way remembering a bizarre memory from the past sometimes feels surreal.
I vaguely remember high-end mannequins from my childhood in fancier boutique windows before print ads and screens pretty much replaced all of them. The few mannequins I do run into today have intentionally been designed to have no facial features, or even lack heads, I guess to avoid invoking the Uncanny Valley.
The magazine has plenty of pictures of German malls at the very height of that lost opulence of the 1980’s.
I can’t help but replay my childhood in my head, the golden tint of nostalgic sepia gilding my memories of walking down shopping malls beneath the dead gazes of these kinds of mannequins.
#archive #malls #memory