Who are you when no one is watching?

Hannah E. Johnson on Mannequin

By now, you should know beauty writer Hannah E. Johnson from her Bimbo Vampire video and many makeup tutorials. She assembles shopping guides for trends (that she’s invented) and niche aesthetics like the Divorcée Diva, Lady of the Chateau, and the Silky Spectre. I wish I could go on naming them, but then I wouldn’t stop. (I also love her “Impossibly Chic Things” series.) Hannah brought up Mannequin (1987), a movie that came about after screenwriter and director Michael Gottlieb thought he saw a mannequin move in the Bergdorf Goodman window. It stars Kim Cattrall, Andrew McCarthy and James Spader.

***

No one brought up Mannequin last summer when Barbie was released. What made you think of this? 

Mannequin is my first cinematic memory. I remember watching it when I was five, which is way too young to be seeing this movie, and I found it terrifying. To me, it was a horror movie, but also, like the ultimate fantasy. So I rewatched it last night to see where my feelings lie. As a kid, I thought she had been cursed in this mannequin's body, but in the movie, it seems like it's her choice to travel through time and inhabit mannequins and sculptures. It's her choice to be this creature.

Is it the ultimate fantasy because she gets to live in the mall? I’m thinking of Career Opportunities, that John Hughes movie where Jennifer Connelly gets locked in a mall overnight. 

I wanted to live in the mall. That was my dream. I remember there was an episode of Arthur where D.W. is terrified she's gonna get left in the mall overnight. And I was like, Why is she scared? I would hide when my mom was shopping, in the hopes that I would get left behind. 

Because of Mannequin, I would walk through the store by myself and just stare at the faces of the mannequins and be like, I know what you do when we're not here. I was convinced that there were people trapped in there. And, I mean, there's that Twilight Zone episode too [“The After Hours”], where all the mannequins come alive at night. So I think as a kid, it's just this fascinating idea that there are these people who only exist at night when no one is watching. I mean, Today's Special too, had a huge impact on me as a Canadian child because of this idea of a woman who's a human and she works in a department store and gets to hang out with a mannequin at night.

Kim Cattrall’s character gets to experience the future. Today, I’m seeing younger content creators obsessed with the 80s (when the movie was released). Are you seeing this too?

I’m even seeing girls in their 20s getting perms. And, you know, their inspiration is women from New Jersey in the 80s. There are a few different accounts that come up on my feed of people who are embodying that sort of acid-washed, big hair, 80s vibe. They're young women looking to buy cars and furniture from that time too. I see so many people who are like, “Here's my 80s Miami apartment.” And I think about that COVID regression. People just thought, why don't I build a fantasy? And the 80s is something that Gen Z can't grasp because their entire lives have been on social media. I remember life pre- and post- this insane dependence on technology. They don't even have a memory of it, so it's like the ultimate fantasy of experiencing something that they never did. But then they'll film these videos with apps that make your video look old, and at the end of the day, I'm like, you're still editing it on your phone, sharing it with people. 

I’m really interested in people who are still living in these very niche looks. I think for me, I like to experiment and try different things. And I'm always digging through my reference archives for 90s Calvin Klein, and 80s YSL – and deciding who I want to be today. Some young people are really committed to a 70s rocker look or 80s New Romantics. People are really into New Wave, and they do the makeup every day. I've always been into people who commit to one look. 

I love people so committed they refuse to be seen in gym clothes.

Like Dita von Teese.

Exactly. We also get a big photoshoot/montage moment in Mannequin – where she gets to try on these different looks. What other montages stood out to you as a kid when you were looking for your style inspiration?  

I saw Clueless (way too young too) and I was obsessed with the movie and the TV show and, I mean, Cher’s closet. The first time anyone sees that, it's just like, well, I need that now. I need that technology. And there are so many millennial app developers who are like, we’ve created Cher's closet. But it’s not the same. It has to be on, like a desktop.

I need the MIS-MATCH error code.

Yes. That was huge!

I’ve always been obsessed with that Steven Meisel shoot in Portfolio. There’s that behind-the-scenes energy of an editorial that’s dying off (like print media).

Do you follow Sandy Linter on Instagram? For people who don’t know, she was a makeup artist in the 70s and 80s. She worked with Gia Carangi a lot and they had a relationship. She’s always posting her old behind-the-scenes photos. And like, this is onsite in India and Egypt. They would go with a crew of like 10-15 people, like the hairstylist and the makeup artist were going to these, like insane locales. And even before that, you know, Veruschka in the desert, because, you know, Diana Vreeland wanted her there. There were these stories of them partying for weeks on these crazy locales, and now, like, is anyone doing anything that interesting? Are they just using backdrops? The budget is definitely not there.

Definitely not. Mannequin is about building a fantasy with your clothing – or in some cases, dressing for the job you have. And then there’s Hollywood Montrose who doesn’t compromise until he has to disguise himself. He’s adamant about protecting his image, saying “Don't tell anyone you saw me dressing like this, I have a reputation to uphold.” 

Hollywood knows he could be taken more seriously but chooses not to be. He chooses big sunglasses and a loud personality. Everybody's kind of expressing who they are in different ways, whether it's Andrew McCarthy's girlfriend who wears these very masculine outfits – these really big baggy jackets, because all her coworkers are men. You know, her hair is pretty much always slicked back, and unless she's on a date, then she lets her hair down. 

When I watch Mannequin I'm even like, yeah, I want to look like a mannequin from the 80s. I want to embody that. I want to embody the images that I saw going to the mall when I was a kid. And I feel like, when you go shopping these days, the inspiration is just not there. It doesn't feel the same. So I retreat into movies, even Dawn of the Dead, for the mall scenes. I love seeing old malls. I love seeing old department stores. That's my comfort. And I feel like there was so much more fantasy up until the early 2000s. You could go to the mall and want to become something different. I remember getting dropped off at square one when I was like 11 with my friends, and our parents just left us there for the day and we would go on adventures.

I left out a really important element throughout this conversation and it’s makeup in Mannequin. 

Mannequins generally have this base face, but I remember Kim Cattrall wearing some frosted pink lips. It’s the glimpses of the counters that gets me salivating. Late at night if I can't sleep, I go on Pinterest and I look at old makeup counters because that was how I discovered makeup, you know, by being told not to touch things, whether it was the older saleswomen or when I was digging through my mom's makeup bag and trying things on. 

When you're that young and no one's willing to teach you or help you at a department store – all I wanted was to be a grown-up, who could someday do my makeup however I wanted, and get dressed up however I wanted. And so seeing that in the movie pushed me to want to express myself, whether with makeup or clothes or just wanting to be somebody else. There are some really old Shoppers Drug Mart ads on YouTube from the early 90s, people shopping at the beauty counter. They have massive bottles of perfume behind them. It's all about the service and interacting with people. Today, you're not experiencing that anywhere you go, especially not at a Shoppers Drug Mart.

When I used to step foot in a department store, it truly felt magical. That’s the ultimate word that I can use to describe both the movie and just that experience as a kid. I mean, even going to, like, the Sears in the Eaton Center – everything seemed so shiny and smelled good, and people seemed so friendly and interesting. And now it's like, they don't want to be there and they don't want you to be there either. You couldn't pay me to willingly step foot in Sephora. I'll order online. 

Going to the mall is a chore now. I miss that beauty department experience you’re talking about – just walking through it, getting spritzed with J’Adore or someone teaching me the original purpose of Benefit’s Benetint. It doesn’t feel like a right of passage for teens today either.

Today’s tweens see everything on Tiktok first, then go to Sephora, and make their mom buy everything for them. But it used to be, you know, an experience. On my 12th birthday, my mom took me to the Clinique counter, and I got my three-step skincare. I thought I was so grown up with my mini Happy perfume. And I don't think that is such a rite of passage anymore either. 

Watching that movie is a way for me to escape now when it was back then too. It's funny how as a child, it made me want to grow up and experience the future because I thought it would be so similar to what their lives were like in their little department store love nest. And now I watch it because I want to go back to that feeling of being five and wandering away from my mom hiding in a rack of clothes.

Malls just don’t feel grand anymore. They’re claustrophobic.

I was at the Eaton Centre a couple of weeks ago and it felt like a weird experience where I felt so exposed. It’s too. There are too many lights. You end up so stressed and angry and mad at people blocking the elevator. Like, where did the magic go?

I also remembered that throughout Mannequin, her dream is to fly? And she gets to hang glide inside the department store at one point, which is insane to think about today.

Why?

That there's real estate this large devoted entirely to commerce. It would never happen today – a department store that big, let alone being able to hang glide in one. And I think this was filmed in a real department store in Philadelphia¹, but I don't think it's open anymore. There's a scene in the movie where there’s no one in the department store and Estelle Getty comments that they’re open, but it's just not busy. That feels so apt for now, where every department store I go into feels like a ghost town. It’s so funny that the whole point of the movie is that this mannequin helps this department store regain customers – that the displays are so amazing that people line up around the block to look at them.

They keep saying brick and mortar is going to come back though.

I think there's a yearning for so much, so much, just real things, things we can touch and see in person. And whether that's retail or print media – people are starting to try and rebuild, like, in-person experiences, and take it offline. I hope there's a resurgence, because even, I mean, in the 70s, there was a weird nostalgia for, like, turn-of-the-century things. They were all obsessed with Art Nouveau. I always said that the Metaverse means nothing to me until they make an immersive 80s mall experience.

Great customer service is becoming a luxury. It’s not going to be as accessible to the masses anymore.

That’s why anytime a movie, pre-2000s has a scene in a department store or like a fine dining restaurant, it's like, it's like a micro-dosing it. Even if I watch an old Gilmore Girls episode where they go shopping, I can see an old Stila makeup display. Things used to look so much better and were so much more tactile, and that shopping experience got me so excited. Or there’s Friends with Money, where Jennifer Annistor is always at the Chanel counter trying to get samples, and she has a pretty good racket going for a while. That wouldn’t happen these days. 

***

For more onscreen mall experiences, Hannah recommends:

Vertigo (1958)

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

1. The original building is now a Macy’s.