We are currently standing in the mannequin storage room, and this is where we keep our mannequins in-between exhibitions at The Museum at FIT.

You will find that most of our objects are dressed on bodies, and that is because half of fashion is actually the fashionable body beneath the garments themselves.

One company has made many mannequins that are actually modeled off of actual people.

Some examples of that are Twiggy or Cher.

And the reason that people might be interested in having mannequins that are modeled off of very specific people's bodies is because they were the people who kind of determined the fashion and the style for what the fashionable body was at that time.

So, the reason that we have Twiggy mannequins is so that our '60s pieces look appropriate when dressed.

And so, here behind me you can see a bunch of contemporary mannequins.

These are the types of mannequins that we would dress contemporary pieces on.

So roughly 2000 to present-day, sometimes '90s, a little bit into the '80s, looks typically good on this type of mannequin.

Most people will recognize these mannequins because they look very similar to the ones you would see in a store that clothes that are for sale are dressed on.

So, these are Rootstein mannequins, and they are so very clearly and obviously '80s.

And that is the effect that we want from a lot of our period mannequins.

And these are not period mannequins that we purchased to imitate the look of the '80s, these are actually mannequins from the '80s.

That type of fashionable body silhouette is actually in both the shape of the body itself and the gesture of the arms and the look of the face.

These era of mannequins are actually much easier to dress garments onto versus our contemporary mannequins, because their bodies are so lifelike and realistic to the actual shape of human bodies.

When it comes to dressing period garments, we have two choices of what we dress them on.

We have period mannequins that are made with bodies that are specifically styled to simulate the fashionable body underneath all of the undergarments.

So while this body is not wearing a corset, it imitates the shape of the body as if it were wearing a corset.

But we can also dress garments on what are called dress forms, and these are what you would find in a dressmaker's studio.

This is what they are using to create garments, either by draping methods or pattern-making methods.

And so we have two periods of different dress forms here.

We have the 20th-century style.

It's called a Wolf Form.

This is what we commonly dress our mid-20th century American garments on.

It has a very evocative stylistic effect of that period.

But here we also have our 19th-century French style dress form.

And this is what we commonly will dress our late-19th century period garments on.

The body plays as much of a part in your interpretation and understanding of the fashion as the clothing does itself.

So, when we choose to dress our objects on different mannequin styles, we're taking that into account.

We want to create the effect and the aesthetic of the time period that the garment is from.