- It's often quicker and easier
to buy something new rather than secondhand,
especially if you're part of a business.
New things can be bought easily online,
usually from a company you've already got a relationship with,
invoiced for automatically, and handled
without really any thought or management required.
And then once your project's finished,
particularly for a short term industry like media or fashion, say,
you can just throw the thing out, 'cause the job's done.
Related to that...
there's a metres-high mountain of mannequins in the Midlands.
- A lot of of them I have purchased, and have been in my collection for hire,
but a lot of them have come along because they were destined for landfill.
Somebody got in touch with me, a friend from a long time ago, and said,
"I see you're hiring mannequins.
"We've got some that are going to be thrown into the bin.
"Would you be interested?"
So I said, "Well, yeah, of course, how many?"
He says, "Oh, about 100."
And then over a period of about four months,
25,000 of them turned up from all over Europe
because people had heard about this mad woman in Lincolnshire
who will rehome unwanted dummies.
There's a deliberate misspelling for the company name,
"manna", food from heaven, and "kin", kindred spirit,
because it was almost gifted to me during a time when really I had nothing.
It was just perfect. Absolutely perfect name.
Where we are right now, this is the spray bay.
When they go out on hire, they look lovely, brand new.
They come back in with chips, broken bits, dirt all over them.
So they're all cleaned up, put on these rails.
And then they're wheeled into the front of the spray bay,
where they receive a new coat of paint.
- Also for £50 here, you can have a "drive-through mannequin heist",
where you get 15 minutes
to fit as many mannequins and mannequin parts as you can
into the back of your car. I did consider doing that,
but... I don't need any mannequins.
- Normally we would have open days
where people can come and go through and collect bits and pieces.
What the whole COVID situation has enabled me to do was, okay,
instead of people just coming in and wandering around,
and you could potentially have quite a lot of people doing that at any one time,
I set up a booking system so that people can book in and pay
and then they drive through and then they stop at "mannequin mountain".
And then I would get on a loud speaker, and have a timer.
And then it's a case of, "you've got 15 minutes
"to fill up the back of your car with body parts!"
It's hilarious.
So some people know what a supermarket sweep is, right?
And they come in and [roaring] and they're all filling up quick.
And then other times you've got people, they've parked their car one end,
but they walk all the way up to the other end
to collect a pair of legs and then come all the way back.
And I'm thinking, you're going to run out of time. [laughs]
So hands are a really interesting one
because if I'm putting together some mannequins from that mountain,
I need to make sure that if I've got 10 of something,
that I've got 10 pairs of hands to go with that,
'cause it needs to be a set.
So we did have someone who turned up once
and literally filled up the back of their car with hands,
and I'm like, [whimpering],
[laughs]
I'm sort-of having a freak out for future putting-mannequins-together.
- I'll be honest, even in daylight,
this place feels a little creepy.
There is something unsettling
about being surrounded by not-quite-human figures in every direction.
Fortunately, the folks here do understand that,
particularly around Halloween.
- At Halloween, I open up the yard
so that people can walk around at night in a mannequin graveyard.
I did something that I called the "Awful Halloween Walk."
It's out in the middle of nowhere.
And there's literally bodies and mannequins all over the place.
So it's not something that you would usually see.
It is something really, really bonkers, out of this world.
And so that has attracted quite a few different film crews,
not just horror films, which is the obvious one,
but also for music videos.
So most people who are selling mannequins in the UK, they do sell them.
They don't do the hire because there's a lot of work involved,
but selling them is a linear process.
So they are made, most of the time, in China.
They get transported over, they go into the shops,
they're used and then they are just put in the bin.
They get crushed. They go into landfill.
Now, they are made from fibreglass.
It's something that doesn't decompose at all.
And also they're really good fun things.
So why on earth would you crush them
and put them into landfill, when in actual fact
there are so many different uses for them that could be done,
not only to wear fashion, but to go onto TV sets, film sets.
People come and get them to decorate their gardens at Halloween.
There's never a reason for "let's put that mannequin in the bin".