Bonaveri Magazine

Let’s start from your most recent project, the
Lanvin exhibition in Shanghai.
Well, it’s about Lanvin’s 130 anniversary but
also it’s very much celebrating Bruno Sialelli’s
new creative directorship. It was an opportunity
to show both an incredibly important history and
also to show how, in his first two collections, he
used that history.
It shows the relationship between the two, with
the mannequin, its pose and other elements,
playing a central role. One mannequin had for
example a wig that has a gold hairline, created
by Angelo Seminara, which is like a masculine
hairline, and then we put gold curls on top of it.
This way Bruno Sialelli shows the
Andrea
Bonaveri
is very
enthusiastic
about
conceptual
projects
that use
mannequins
inspiration to Art Deco and the tight curls that I
am sure you can picture.
The mannequins were both male and female,
because Bruno is doing menswear and
womenswear. Even in a wig all the concepts are
kind of present. And so the gesture… everything
about those mannequins is part of a series of
references within the exhibition. It was very
important to me to have those mannequins
covered in calico fabric. For me it’s like my
canvas.
Andrea Bonaveri is always very receptive to
that, and very enthusiastic about conceptual
projects that use mannequins also to celebrate the
history of mannequins, that is an important history.
September 2018, San Giorgio Island, Venice.
Within the glorious event “Homo Faber” organized by
Michelangelo Foundation to promote craftsmanship,
you staged “Fashion Inside and Out” exhibition in an
unusual abandoned swimming pool setting! And it
stole the scene and most of the attention.
Well, you know the context, so it was obviously about
celebrating the exquisite craft and so that presented
a dilemma, because people don’t immediately put
together the idea of couture and the idea of a swimming
pool, they are thought of as opposites. So I thought I
wanted to look at the alchemy of craft and how you
take a swimming pool and transform it into something
glorious. So I started looking at fashion that used raw
materials and transformed them by hours and hours
of skilled work - hay, wood, wooden beads, - and so
we decided to construct the installation with the same
materials to show their transformative power.
Even the wigs were made out of wood. Everything
kind of revealed its craft, which was in keeping with
the “Homo Faber” concept. And the pool was always
there in the background as the essential player in the
exhibition. You couldn’t get past the fact that you were
in a swimming pool.
Stephen Jones had famously created a hat that was
called Wash&Go, which looked as though you had just
come out of the shower, dripping with water.
I thought: “What if I combine Stephen Jones couture
skills with Bonaveri articulated mannequins to put the
swimmers back in the pool, to give life to the swimming
pool?” So I commissioned the three Wash hats,
which of course were showing craft, and the Bonaveri
mannequins were also showing their own virtuosity.
So, look, the whole installation has to engage with the
subject, not only the dresses. Everything was crafted
from scratch for the exhibition. I think that’s what
people responded to, that it’s a holistic exhibition.
Everything that you saw in the space had been given
the same amount of attention.
Judith, how did you start your career and train for this
fascinating field?
I trained as an architect; my mentality was and is that
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