Interested in the history of mannequins?  Here's an excerpt from  the International Herald Tribune 10/17/98: PARIS - Who can compete with top models? Not the dummies in the windows, those material girls and boys who never make the catwalks because they are made of wax, wood, plaster, cloth or fiberglass. Artists have been known to become obsessed with these mannequins. When Alma Mahler jilted him, Oscar Schlemmer, the Bauhaus painter, crafted a doll to take her place beside him in his car when driving in Vienna. But commercial and technological forces, not artists' visions, have shaped the history of mannequins over the last 150 or so years that they have figured in the theatrical side of shopping. Based on foundations of molded papier-mâché, the Imans mannequins had an elegance of their own, a sleek Art Deco look with oval faces and high cheek bones. These Parisian models competed with the so-called Gaba Girls produced in America and based loosely on film stars such as Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo. The idea of using real stars - from the movies and later from fashion itself - would then prevail for decades, especially as the technology improved to the point where it became possible in the 1960s to produce mannequins molded on real people. Such radical innovations have been rare in mannequin history, which has mainly been a story of slow evolution as manufacturers (and the fashion industry) tried to reconcile the competing demands of change: in women's bodies (and men's), in tolerance for provocative sexiness, in fashion, and in ideas about what kind of display actually incites customers to buy what they see on mannequins. It was the 1960s that propelled the mannequin into the elaborate poses developed in fashion photography and made possible by fiberglass technology, lightening and cheapening the body parts to assemble in gravity-defying poses. The window mannequin emerged in the mid-1980s to take advantage of the big window spaces in the first stores built with steel girders, an architectural change soon followed by electric lighting that made store windows into theater. As a sales tool for clothes, mannequins have always tended to be taller than the average woman (clothes look better on tall people, designers say), with exaggeratedly long legs, small waists and high bust. It was the 1960s that propelled the mannequin into the elaborate poses developed in fashion photography and made possible by fiberglass technology, lightening and cheapening the body parts to assemble in gravity-defying poses. All these trends - technical possibilities for creating lifelike bodies cheaply, the energizing impact of photography on models and mannequins and the sudden switch from dolls to top models as the prototypical image of the idealized female - produced a generation of store mannequins in the 1980s that seemed to have walked out of the celebrated series of photographs by Helmut Newton entitled ''The Big Nudes.'' That slow evolution, in which the material dummies gradually resembled live models with bodies of extreme physical beauty, seems to have run its course, with the 1980s mannequins quickly taking on a dated feel. For contemporary women, this exaggerated effort to portray the superhuman as possible, at least in a supermodel, chills people and turns off potential customers, according to Marianne Thesander, author of ''The Feminist Ideal.'' Trendspotters working on visual conventions predict that mannequins will become more abstract in the way they convey women's bodies, perhaps simplifying their forms to the point where they become mere suggestions of female form: an arc for shoulders, two cones for the bust and another arc, perhaps in foam rubber, for hips. JOSEPH FITCHETT is on the staff of the International Herald Tribune.