So the male mannequins are getting skinnier as we in the general population get larger. No surprise there. The twinning of skinniness with girth growth has been evident since the days of Twiggy, when the formally differently sized and shaped female population were exhorted to take on this new diminishing of a woman's form and, as a result, got larger.
Not that it was Twiggy's fault, but the ubiquity of her image created a sense in young women that to be stylish meant to be skinny, flat-chested with an ingénue face and straight hair. We women, and there were millions of us, tried to fit to the mode. There was dieting, lots and lots of it, and while it worked for some – for some of the time – mostly women got bigger rather than smaller as dieting cycling sent them on the fastest way to gain weight.