Meet Cynthia: The Gaba Girl Mannequin With A Better Life Than You
Free jewelry from Tiffany and Cartier. A no-limit Saks credit card. Gifted designer fashions delivered straight to your doorstep. While these might seem like the trappings of a modern-day influencer or Hollywood nepo baby, things like this happened to Cynthia all the time. A 5’6”,100-pound model with her own newspaper column and radio show, Cynthia lived the kind of life most of us can only dream about–without ever living life at all.
Unlike the starlets of today, who are still occasionally forced to work for a living, Cynthia never had to lift a finger to get everything she wanted. Of course, the fact that she was a mannequin might have had something to do with it.
Cynthia was the creation of Lester Gaba, a soap sculptor and department store window designer born in Hannibal, Missouri to shopkeeper parents. After attending art school in Chicago, Gaba moved to New York in 1932 with dreams of creating beautiful storefronts and eye-catching window displays.
When he arrived in New York, however, Gaba found the city’s department store window displays –and the mannequins inside of them–to be lacking. Not only did the wax mannequins melt in the city heat, terrifying children with their grotesque contorted faces, but Gaba also felt they had no personality.
To sell clothes, Gaba knew, the women shopping in these stores needed to see themselves in the mannequins–literally. His mannequins, called “Gaba Girls,” were designed after New York City’s most famous socialites, who eagerly posed for their very own three-dimensional portraits and enjoyed seeing versions of themselves in the stores they frequented.
Gaba’s mantra? “Put Joan Crawford in a store case, and even husbands will want to go window shopping.”
Drawing on his soap carving skills, Gaba’s designs eventually got the attention of Saks Fifth Avenue, who commissioned him to create the store’s window display. Thus, Cynthia was born.
Modeled after Cynthia Wells, about whom little is known today, Cynthia the mannequin had two different-sized feet and freckles, showing Gaba’s understanding of the power of attainable beauty over perfection. Cynthia possessed a quality that’s as rare today as it was back then: she was real.
Though initially confined to Gaba’s apartment, Cynthia became an instant sensation when Gaba dressed her up and took her out on the town. The brilliant marketing plan worked instantly: Cynthia (and, by extension, Gaba) became a tabloid fixture.
In 1937, Cynthia landed the cover and an impressive spread in LIFE Magazine, which showed her attending the theatre, smoking cigarettes surrounded by handsome men in bars and clubs, getting a manicure, and even being carried over the threshold by Gaba while wearing a stunning fur coat.
Cynthia’s closet was filled, for free, with the latest and most enviable fashions of the day, including designs from Lord&Taylor and the celebrated milliner Lilly Daché. Her closet was valued at over $80,000. She hobnobbed with high society, including the novelist Thyra Samter Winslow, the muralist Franklin Hughes, and the famed photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, who was responsible for some of the most famous photographs of Cynthia.
Cynthia landed a cameo in the 1938 film Artists and Models Abroad with Jack Benny, had a box seat at the Metropolitan Opera, wrote an advice column, and received a constant stream of fan mail. She hosted a radio show, never letting the fact that she couldn’t talk stand in her way (Gaba explained her silence away as chronic laryngitis.) Cynthia even declined an invitation to Wallis Simpson’s wedding to Edward VIII. Given that Simpson was a known Nazi sympathizer, I applaud Cynthia’s decision. Gaba’s success hardly paled in comparison to Cynthia’s: he became an in-demand mannequin and window display designer throughout the city, creating even more Gaba Girls for society to lust after.
Like so many fragile things, Cynthia met her demise at the hands of a hard floor. Allegedly, Gaba shipped Cynthia back to his mother’s house in Hannibal, alongside instructions that Cynthia continue to be treated like a real person. Whether accidentally or intentionally (I’m not sure how long I could keep up the facade of parading my adult son’s mannequin around town on his behalf) Cynthia slipped from her chair at the beauty salon in 1942 and shattered. Later that year, Gaba was drafted.
To some, Gaba’s anthropomorphization of Cynthia might seem like a cheap gimmick, an uncreative bid for attention that yielded unbelievable and undeserved results. Others could read Gaba’s obsession with Cynthia as a consequence of sexual repression and latent homosexuality (Gaba was rumored to have had an affair with Vincente Minnelli.)
I, however, enjoy Gaba’s ability to not simply embrace the bizarre, but to actively convince others to join in the Cynthia charade with him–even buttoned-up socialites and celebrities. To me, Cynthia represents the kind of harmless mass delusion that is only really possible in New York City.
In New York, if you’re bored, broke, or both, all you really have to do is put on a ridiculous and attention-getting outfit, leave your apartment, and you’ve got yourself an evening. People here flock to the weirdest person in the room. They introduce themselves, ask for photographs and social media handles, extend invitations, send over cocktails: the allure of the outlandish stranger is undeniable. There’s a sense of safety, too, in the hyper-ostentatious: If someone in the room is a potential threat, it’s probably not the guy lugging around a lifesize mannequin dressed in a bridal gown and holding an unlit cigarette between two plaster fingers–too obvious.
When people approach oddballs like Gaba, they think they want to know why someone would do such a strange thing, what possessed him to turn a mannequin into a perpetual dinner companion. But what they really want to know is, Can I do something just as outrageous? And if I did, could I get away with it like he can?
We all have our own inner Cynthias: for me, Cynthia is a suede blue fringe jacket, a pair of beaded earrings in the shape of vodka bottles, or my enormous Easter Parade hat with glittering eggs and long pastel garlands that skim the floor when I walk. She’s that “little something extra” I put on to take a normal outfit to the next level–even if to some, my next level is tacky or out-of-step with the occasion.
Of course, it’s all an illusion, a joke. Something to lift my spirits and, on a good day, the spirits of those around me. But that’s the fun of Cynthia: it’s impossible to take her seriously, so you might as well join in on the fun.