ELECTRIC MANNEQUINS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19997, 14 January 1927, Page 15

ELECTRIC MANNEQUINS.

CREATE A SENSATION IN LONDON. A wonder of the hour is the electric mannequins (writes the London correspondent of the Melbourne Argus). Australian visitors, who have spent much time in the shopping districts of London, such as Regent street, Oxford street, or High street, Kensington, must have been struck by the realistic scenes staged in the a.essmakers’ windows of West London. At times, 50 or 60 wax figures are posed, with appropriate furniture, so that one has the suggestion of looking into a series of gaily lighted rooms, and seeing a whole family about its business —madame in her boudoir, mademoiselle in her little bedroom wearing dainty night attire, the father of the family in his study, and the children, maybe, enjoying their evening bath. The latest lung in the West End windows is a mannequin, which not only moves, but smokes. Each figure is furnished with a flexible skin and movable : joints, and is operated by an ingenious system of elect, ical machinery hidden in ! ihe body. A figure wearing a fur-trimmed : wrap, for example, will turn on its heels, lift its arras, and incline its head, as if it were a live mannequin. A figure wearing pyjamas and a smoking jacket will idly lift a cigarette holder and then blow a cloud of smoke from its lips the smoke being produced by chemicals hidden within the flexible “skin.” The electric mannequins created a sensation in the ILcmpton road recently, and suggested that costumiers may yet rival theatrical managers in the realism of their mock displays.