In 1936, a glamour girl named Cynthia became a minor toast of the town. She went around with a guy named Lester, who took her to all the showoff places in New York ? the opera, El Morocco ? and the next year she made the cover of Life magazine. Cynthia would get fan mail, but if anyone ever got a reply, it was guaranteed to come from Lester.

That’s because Cynthia was a mannequin, the work of Lester Gaba. Saks Fifth Avenue had wanted a lifelike mannequin, and Lester, a soap sculptor of untapped skills (he later became a columnist for Women’s Wear Daily), needed little encouragement.

In 1953, Lester thought his hollow lady should have a TV show. He spent $10,000 to have her jaw wired so she could say witty things, and he hid the cables in the back of her Dior dress. But it was no good, he told Gay Talese, in The New York Times, some years afterward. “Cynthia never made any sense,” he said.

One evening a few weeks ago a friend driving past Saks looked and said, “I wonder what mannequins tell us about who we are.”

At their best they tell us how we stand and carry our bodies; whether we want to be tall, willowy, athletic, busty, Amazonian, and if we need to pay attention to our arches. But even at their worst - headless, colorless, listless - a mannequin tells us something about ourselves.

Twenty or 30 years ago, it was easy to walk down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and see differences in mannequins, differences not only in color and ethnic characteristics but also attitude and even emotion, which were conveyed by the novelty of the displays and, of course, the fashion.

Nowadays, though, with few exceptions, the great avenue provides a window into limited resources and eroded convictions. By using the generic-looking mannequins, stores seem to want to erase the issue of race and ethnic identity, as much as blogs now serve to highlight these distinctions.

“A lot of stores just avoid that issue by spraying everything gloss white and not putting any features on the mannequin,” said Michael Steward, the executive vice president of Rootstein, a specialist in realistic mannequins based in New York and London.

Many retailers prefer abstract mannequins for reasons of aesthetics and cost, a consideration as they shift more marketing dollars to online sales and reduce display staffs. “It’s an easier way of getting the message across,” Richard Fosdick, the merchandise display director at Saks .

But according to people in retailing like Jonny Hooley, who is responsible for displays in 63 Zara stores in Britain, realistics are, in Mr. Hooley’s words, “creeping back.” He says it’s because young consumers want to be inspired and are bored with the sameness of everything.

Windows used to be stages for human caprice and drama, never more so than when the artist Victor Hugo arranged to have a mannequin give birth in the windows of Halston on Madison Avenue in the ‘70s. Now all that energy takes place on the Web.