Mannequins With Ever More Insane Proportions  Photo: MERIDITH
KOHUT/The New York Times  In stores across Venezuela, clothes
are modeled by bizarre mannequins with "bulging bosom and
cantilevered buttocks, a wasp waist and long legs," says The New
York Times. According to Eliezer Álvarez, the designer of the
fiberglass femmes, they are based on his perceptions of the way
Venezuelan women actually look. Unsurprisingly, they seem to be
inspiring a new normal standard of cartoon-busty women. It's a
chicken/egg situation — is life imitating big-boobed mannequins,
or vice-versa? Putting aside the impossible, damaging beauty
standard of these plastic women, not to mention how they jar
with Venezuela's socialist politics, surely this can't be the
best way to get someone to buy a tube top? But I digress.
According to the Times, the mannequins reflect a long-standing
cultural investment in "buena presencia," the idea that everyone
should be "a hard worker, a good worker, and an honest person."
How better to show the w