To paraphrase Mr. Will Cuppy, the thing nowadays is how to tell your friends from the department store window mannequins.

That's because of such people as Lester Gaba, and Miss Ray Dumont. Not forgetting the Paris Exposition of 1925.

Up to 1925, if you got mixed in a department store window, you couldn't tell whether you were in Mrs. Jarley's wax works or in a bad dream.

The ladies and gentlemen that clothes were shown on were great, stout, formidable creatures who yielded about as much velvet and lace fripperies as the Rock of Gibraltar.

But then came the Paris Exposition. Someone had a mild attack of revolution, and anyting at the exposition in the form of a mannequin blossomed out into a furious kind of modernism, all points and silver paint.

Figures for window decoration always follow the trend in furniture and all the mannequins took on the Brancusi manner, billiard ball heads, with a dot for the nose, and eyes barely indicated, the whole painted in weird colors, chromium, walnut, gold, what not?

The idea leaped the Atlantic, and American stores burst forth with window colonies of grotesques, and it was simply too much for some American experts on window designing who still had their feet on the ground, and they decided something had to be done.

Ruth Fleischer was editing a magazine called Advertising Arts, and she ran across Lester Gaba somewhere, and she said, "Look here, this window dressing business is getting pretty bad; why don't you write something for me about it?"

And Mr. Gaba was pretty surprised, because he had never had anything to do with window decoration, but had been working industriously with soap sculptures for people like Procter & Gamble, and the du Ponts.

True, when a du Pont fabric was shown in a dress in Best's window in New York, they sometimes made a little exhibit of the soap sculptures, too, for those were the figure medium the du Ponts had used to advertise the material.

Well, anyhow, Gaba wrote a piece for Miss Fleischer. And pretty soon, he went to a party and at it he met, Miss Mary Lewis, who is vice-president of Best's, and she said, "Look here, I saw that thing you wrote for Ruth Fleischer. Why don't you design some mannequins for our windows?"

And he was more surprised than ever, because his soap sculptures were just little things, and mannequins for windows had to be great big, life-size figures.

And he said slowly, "Well, I don't know exactly why I don't. But I suppose it's because if I did, I wouldn't know what to do with them when they were finished."

And Miss Lewis laughed and said, "You design 'em, I'll buy them."

And he said, "You really mean it?"

And Miss Lewis said, "Yes, if you can get the quality into life-size figures that you do in soap, they would be wonderful. Anyhow, have a try."

So he set to work to see if he could design some mannequins that Miss Lewis could buy. He had to laugh at himself, for he never expected to be doing such a thing.

But, then, he never really expected to be a soap sculptor either, and if he could be that, he could probably be a designer of a mannequin.