Bonaveri Magazine

of an architect. I grew up in Rome and then I
moved to London to go to University, where I
studied architecture.
I have worked as an exhibition maker for 20
years; I set up a small experimental gallery in
London, exclusively dedicated to exhibiting
dress and fashion. It was the first in the world to
look at this within a small gallery environment,
because at that stage it was only the big
museums that were doing exhibitions of dress,
or there were temporary exhibitions in many,
many regional museums, where often budgets
prevented them from changing the display very
often in order to experiment.
So you had on the one hand the big kind of
museums, you had of course dress as social
history, and then you had the very commercial
The mannequins,
the dress, the
plinths, the
lighting, the
mise-en-scène…
it’s all equally
important
within the
narrative.
reality of course of dress in a shop window.
There wasn’t a huge dialogue between these
very different worlds and it didn’t exist at the
level of an experimental exhibition within a
gallery space. So in a way I came in with the
desire to work within this other space, with the
mentality of an experimental exhibition maker
and maker of installations. So this is in a way
was how I came in this field.
You just defined yourself as an exhibition maker and
not curator, which is different I guess.
I do both and in a way an exhibition maker is both:
I work in the round so I work towards an exhibition
holistically; I work with the objects but I work with
them very much already conceived within the given
space. So the mannequins, the dress, the plinths,
the lighting, the mise-en-scène… whatever it is, it all
equally important within the narrative.
I do both, it’s very very much about the concept,
but also how about to tell the story and the concept
running through everything involved, from the props,
wigs, mannequins… everything around it, as I was
explaining before.
The collaboration with Bonaveri includes several
exhibitions and projects. How did your relationship
come about?
Well, for various reasons. I am a lover of the history
of exhibitions and I was very interested in Diana
Vreeland’s use of the Schläppi and about what could be
considered a kind of quintessential mannequin within
fashion, not within dress history but specifically within
fashion. I thought they were producing something that
is not only a mannequin, but also like an essential
prop, because their mannequins came to represent
one of the narratives within fashion exhibitions. Now it
comes with controversy, because Diana Vreeland was
also criticized - she was criticized for being sort of too
focused on fashion and not enough on dress history,
and so for me the mannequins that I now always use
with Bonaveri are themselves the concept. It is the
essential fashion like the high-end shop mannequins
you can find in a store but covered in calico fabric,
which is the quintessential conservation material
for historical dress. So my conceptual statement is
both: I am working with the shop window mannequin
but I am working with it in a museological way. And
Bonaveri not only respects a mannequin that makes a
contemporary dress look beautifully styled…. but also
by coating it in calico fabric they give it a conceptual
edge for me.
Museology, which is the class you teach at London
College of Fashion.
It’s everything to do with fashion in a museum, the
relationship between the fashion system and the
museum and how to put these two things together.
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