Fashion and identity are deeply intertwined with one another in situated performativity, entailing not only individuals but atmospheres and relations to others and the Other. Something drawn upon by fashion retail, perhaps most noticeably through mannequins (living or dolls). As a near-constant presence in increasing portions of public space, they become material statements in negotiations of public culture and subjectivity.

These mannequins depend on a number of factors for their effect, including degrees of interactivity and directionality. The logic of the mannequin, as Louisa Iarocci names it, is dependent on an abstracted or de-personalized character, requiring the viewer to participate through completion. By balancing the concrete and the abstract, they draw upon the viewer’s imagination and projection to become meaningful; they perform diagrammatic operations in the form of being what Gilles Châtelet terms concrete abstractions not only allowing, but requiring the compliance of the viewer for their effects—but situated in space as almost bodies, almost persons.

The recent exhibition at the dance Museum, Stockholm, Koroly’s Costume drama offered a unique opportunity to investigate this in-betweenness, as well as questions of situatedness,

abstraction-prothesis, expression, atmosphere, and various forms of interaction hands on—from directly completing or participating in the staged drama to ignoring them altogether, to treating them ‘as is’; that is, as inanimate objects.

This paper makes use of this exhibition to investigate an increasingly present phenomenon in public space, which clearly participate in (re)production of gender norms and gendered body-subject identities, as well as subject-structures and who is a subject or object for whom. It further builds on the need to closer investigate their modes of operation in order to critically address their role in such processes of subjectification. It further extends this study into their treatment in public and commercial space positioned as a critical architectural question.