Bonaveri Magazine

Award from The Province of Antwerp for his
contribution to Culture and in July 2019, in
France, he was appointed ‘Officier de l’Ordre des
Arts et des Lettres’ by the Minister of Culture –
in honour of his significant contributions to the
arts, literature, promoting them in France and
around the world.
“I have been working directly with Bonaveri for
many years, since 2001, when we renovated
our flagship store ‘het Modepaleis’ in Antwerp
and we started working on some customised
shapes and bust forms. But I had come
across them even before,” he says. “We have
Bonaveri mannequins in our shops, corners
and showroom. They are still the best way to
represent our clothes.”
(Chief Curator at the museum at that time, editor’s
note) was a great experience; I had the opportunity to
visit their archives, and as you can imagine, a French
Fashion Museum has all the iconic pieces that you
have known for decades and that have influenced
fashion and how people dressed over the years. The
idea of the exhibition was to let people have a look
into my world, into my references and to show different
layers of inspirations that made me the designer that
I am.
A long-time friend of
the Bonaveri household
is Dries Van Noten,
the Belgian designer
renowned for his mastery
of exquisite fabrics and
his innovative eye for
prints, embroideries
and colour.
Born in 1958, the third generation in a family of tailors,
he attended the fashion design course at Antwerp’s
Royal Academy. Upon graduating, not only did he
begin to freelance as a consultant designer but he
also opened a tiny eponymous boutique in Antwerp.
In 1986, Dries Van Noten started his own collection
of menswear, receiving right away positive reviews
and attention from the best departments stores and
buyers worldwide.
And from here, fashion show after fashion show,
year by year, Dries Van Noten matured to become
one of the major protagonists of the international
fashion panorama, in balance between Antwerp, his
hometown, where his studio is still based, and Paris,
where his men’s and women’s runways take place
every season.
Just a few notes on the calibre of his person beyond
fashion: in October 2016, he received the Culture
The bond between the two of them tightened a
few years later, when they worked hand in hand
on the occasion of his exhibition, “Dries Van
Noten: Inspirations”, that went on stage first
in Paris at Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 2014
and then with a new configuration, in 2015 at
the MoMu fashion museum in Antwerp. As the
name itself says, “Inspirations” told about and
recounted Dries’s world of references and rich
universe of passions, from music to movies
and performing arts, at the heart of his creative
process and collections.
Upon Dries’ invitation, Andrea Bonaveri and
his team drove up from to Antwerp to meet in
him in person in his studio, and to sit down and
discuss together his needs and desires for the
anthology and to enhance at their best Dries’
clothes.
What is inspiration?
Everything can be inspiration, it can be
something beautiful or something ugly. I think
you get inspired by things that move you,
things that evoke an emotion. The starting
point of the exhibition was that it couldn’t
be a retrospective, since I’m still a designer
working on my collections every day and I’m
still enjoying it. Working together with Musée
des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and Pamela Golbin
Did you come across any challenges during its
preparation?
Sometimes you remember things differently than
how they were in a collection. The fashion show,
the venue, the music, the light, the model that
wore the outfit… all form the image you have from a
silhouette. If you see these silhouettes back in a more
neutral environment they can give a totally different
message. So for this exhibition we started to bring
the collections chronologically out of our archives and
put the strongest looks on mannequins. For me this
was challenging in a way because as a designer you
always work on the next collection, you’re always a
season ahead and you don’t look at the past. We had
to consider the looks also with reference to the their
time period; some looks date back to 1996, that’s 25
years ago!
For “Inspirations” you collaborated with Bonaveri
for custom bust forms, hand-picking every detail
yourself, from the fabric and heads, to the wooden
articulated arms of the bust forms. What is the role
of the mannequin in expressing your work?
The biggest challenge for me is that the mannequin
has to bring the clothes to life. We’re used to seeing
196
BONAVERI 197
Bonaveri_Magazine_Final_Final.indd 196-197 31/01/2020 10:11