Shop mannequins given extreme makeover in surgery-obsessed society Frustrated with the modest sales at his small mannequin factory, Eliezer Alvarez made a simple observation: Venezuelan women were increasingly using plastic surgery to transform their bodies, yet the mannequins in clothing stores did not reflect these new, often extreme proportions. So he went back to his workshop and created the kind of woman he thought the public wanted - one with a bulging bosom and cantilevered buttocks, a wasp waist and long legs, a fibreglass fantasy, Venezuelan style. The shape was augmented, and so were sales. Now his mannequins, and others like them, have become the standard in stores across Venezuela, serving as an exaggerated, sometimes polarising, vision of the female form that calls out from the doorways of tiny shops selling cheap clothes to working-class women and the display windows of fancy boutiques in multilevel shopping malls. Alvarez's art may have been meant to imitate life. But in a culture saturated with such images, life is returning the compliment. Cosmetic procedures are so fashionable here that a woman with implants is often casually referred to as "an operated woman." Women freely talk about their surgeries, and mannequin makers jokingly refer to the creations as being "operated" as well. The embrace of plastic surgery clashes with the government's socialist ideology and frequent talk of creating a society free of the taint of commercialism. Venezuela's longtime leader, Hugo Chavez, who died in March after 14 years in office, railed against the procedures, saying it was "monstrous" that poor women were spending money on breast surgeries when they had trouble making ends meet. But the same resource that the government relies on - the world's largest estimated petroleum reserves - has long fed a culture of easy money and consumerism here, along with a penchant for the quick fix and instant gratification. "Venezuela is known for its oil, and it's known for its beauty," said Lauren Gulbas, a feminist scholar and anthropologist at Dartmouth College, who has studied attitudes towards plastic surgery in Venezuela. The little data available indicates that Venezuelan women do not get plastic surgery more than their counterparts in many other countries. But Gulbas said the surgeries take on an elevated status. "There's this notion in Venezuela of 'buena presencia', 'good presence,"' she said. There's a virtue associated with looking a certain way.