Mannequin Challenge — Concept, styling & manipulation by Nazlı Can

Four characters, one dress form, and no body underneath to make any of them convincing.

A group brief from History of Visual Communication: build a figure without a figure. Working as Group 3 — with Ashley Paola Buret Ramirez, Yijia Shao and Ami Toyoda — we wrote four archetypes, La Bomba, Rebel, Multicultural and Brat, each pulled from a different visual lineage: Copacabana showgirls, Picasso's cubism, diasporic craft, and Eve as the first brat. Each was researched, boarded, then styled directly onto the mannequin out of clothes, wire, netting and whatever the studio had.

Three of the four were realised and photographed, then cut out of their backgrounds so the silhouette had to carry the whole story on its own. The second half was mine alone: pushing those stills into motion with AI video — cubist shards falling around the Rebel form, Lola redrawn onto a theatre stage — turning a static styling exercise into a short piece of digital content.

The cut-outs were then animated: the Rebel form with its own cubist debris falling around it, Lola redrawn as a stage illustration. The brief asked for a GIF, and La Bomba was delivered as one — short, silent, looping. The object moves just enough to stop reading as a photograph.