Sunday, 20 September 2026
There are moments when travelling when you encounter something so culturally significant, so anthropologically intriguing and so deserving of serious investigation that you have no option but to stop what you are doing and stare at a plastic bottom. This happened to me in San José, Costa Rica.
I was walking through a perfectly ordinary clothing shop when I noticed a mannequin. Normally, mannequins barely register with me. They stand around looking impossibly thin, unusually tall and irritatingly pleased with themselves despite having neither employment nor internal organs. European mannequins in particular often possess the physique of someone who has survived for several months on sparkling water and the occasional almond. This one was different. She had hips. Not apologetic hips. Not the sort of hips requiring you to turn sideways and examine the mannequin carefully to establish whether they actually existed. These were proper, structurally committed hips, accompanied by substantial thighs, a clearly defined waist and a backside that suggested the mannequin factory had finally discovered that the human body continues below the ribcage.
Naturally, being British, rather than simply accepting this and carrying on with my shopping, I began conducting an entirely unsolicited sociological investigation beside the trouser department. The obvious question was whether the mannequin reflected the women who actually shop there. Retailers, after all, are generally interested in selling clothes. Putting trousers on a plastic woman whose proportions bear absolutely no relationship to those of the customers seems a slightly questionable sales strategy. It would be rather like demonstrating a family hatchback using a Formula One driver and then wondering why everybody complains about getting into it.
There is some statistical background to the question. Research has found high levels of overweight and obesity among Costa Rica’s adult population, including women. But before anyone concludes that I have travelled thousands of kilometres to announce that Costa Rican women have large bottoms, science requires us to put the tape measure away. Weight and shape are not the same thing. A woman can have a narrow waist and pronounced hips without being overweight. Another can have relatively narrow hips while carrying more weight elsewhere. BMI tells you remarkably little about whether a pair of trousers is going to stage a rebellion somewhere between your waist and your thighs.
Human beings inconveniently refuse to come in one standard shape. This appears to have taken parts of the fashion industry several decades to discover. For years, the traditional fashion mannequin looked as though it had been designed by somebody who had heard women described over the telephone but had never actually encountered one. Legs became extraordinarily long, hips mysteriously disappeared and waists reached dimensions normally associated with champagne flutes. Then you would take the trousers off the mannequin, enter the changing room and discover an entirely different engineering problem. The trousers that had cascaded elegantly from the mannequin would encounter an actual human thigh and immediately reconsider their career.
That is why the San José mannequin was rather interesting. She wasn’t obviously being presented as a specialist plus-size model. She was simply standing there wearing ordinary clothes with the quiet confidence of a plastic woman who knew exactly where her hips were. And commercially, that makes considerable sense. If many of your customers have fuller hips and thighs, trousers should presumably be displayed on something vaguely resembling them. This isn’t revolutionary body politics. It is merchandising. Customers generally prefer knowing approximately what clothes might look like on a human being before surrendering their credit card.
There is also a cultural dimension. Across parts of Latin America, curvier female silhouettes have often been considerably more visible in mainstream popular culture and fashion than in the traditionally ultra-slim imagery associated with European high fashion. That does not mean there is a standard Latin American woman issued at birth somewhere near immigration control. Costa Rica itself contains enormous variation in ancestry, age, lifestyle and body type. Genetics plays a part in body shape. So do hormones, age, muscle, diet, physical activity and where an individual’s body decides to store fat — a decision the body makes independently and apparently without consulting its owner.
Modern lifestyles complicate things further. Costa Rica, like many countries, has experienced urbanisation, changing diets, more processed foods and increasingly sedentary lifestyles. These changes have contributed to rising rates of overweight and obesity. But again, none of this establishes that Costa Rican women are biologically programmed to possess magnificent hips. What we can establish with considerably greater confidence is that somebody responsible for supplying mannequins to this San José shop looked at the local market and said, effectively, “Give her some thighs.” And nobody panicked.
That is perhaps the most interesting part. Put the same trousers in certain European fashion boutiques and they might be displayed on a mannequin whose legs resemble two drinking straws descending from a coat hanger. In San José, here was a mannequin with an unmistakable waist-to-hip difference, calmly modelling everyday clothing without being labelled “curvy”, “real”, “inclusive” or any of the other marketing terminology normally deployed when the fashion industry discovers a body shape that has existed since the beginning of humanity. She was simply the mannequin. Perhaps that is progress.
Of course, one plastic woman in one San José shop cannot tell us what Costa Rican women look like. That would be terrible science, although admittedly excellent material for a newspaper headline. What she can tell us is what somebody believes customers will recognise. Mannequins are, after all, rather peculiar cultural objects. They don’t eat, age, exercise, become pregnant, develop middle-aged enthusiasm for wine or discover at 48 that carbohydrates have apparently changed the terms and conditions. Yet retailers continually redesign them to resemble the societies standing on the other side of the shop window.
Which means that while economists study consumption figures, sociologists conduct surveys and academics analyse demographic datasets, I may have discovered another indicator of social change: go shopping and inspect the bottoms. San José’s mannequin wasn’t proof that Costa Rican women have larger hips than European women. It was something subtler and arguably more interesting: evidence that at least part of the local fashion industry considers a fuller female silhouette ordinary enough that nobody needs to explain it.
And after decades of fashion mannequins apparently surviving exclusively on cigarettes, mineral water and disappointment, seeing one with a proper backside was strangely refreshing. I didn’t buy the trousers. But I did leave with considerably more respect for the mannequin.
Author: Mitzilinka (Turning grim reality into comic relief-without losing the truth)
