But it wasn’t always that easy. The first mannequin Hosni made, back in 1952, was so heavy “we would’ve needed a truck to carry it to the shop. And it would have crushed anybody who tried to put it on display.” Yet developing a sponge and paste on paper technique to make the mannequins light enough to carry with one arm wouldn’t solve a much greater obstacle. The large department stores, run and owned mainly by Jews, used expensive mannequins imported from England and Italy and were reluctant to use locally produced models. “I still remember climbing on top of my mannequins to prove that the local ones were better and stronger than the imports.” But the Egyptian shop owners refused altogether, because “people said that what I was doing was Haram - against religious teachings - and it took a long time before my work was accepted".