New York, June 2026 — The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute presents Costume Art, on view through January 10, 2027 in the renovated Condé M. Nast Galleries. The exhibition explores the “dressed body” as a meeting point between art and fashion, tracing how works and garments connect body, identity, and creation across eras and styles.
Once again, the Met has turned to Bonaveri to interpret the exhibition’s theme through its mannequins, continuing a collaboration built on trust. For this exhibition, Bonaveri contributes a series of custom, dressable mannequins built around a new generation of forms drawn directly from real bodies.
Curated by Andrew Bolton, the exhibition examines the body in its many forms: classical, idealized, transformed, marginal, universal — and, notably, bodies long excluded from museum representation, now shown in their full physical and personal specificity. Some mannequins are based on real bodies captured through 3D scanning, marking a shift from the body as idealized model to the body as authentic, individual presence.
Bonaveri’s process is slow and sculptural. Posture, weight, and tension are observed, then rebalanced and reshaped. Each mannequin starts with a simple question — who is this figure, what does it express — moving from technical precision to something more personal.
“The Met’s call was a moment of quiet awareness,” says Andrea Bonaveri, CEO. “This wasn’t about making an object — it was about giving shape to a presence. The mannequin becomes a threshold: where fashion, memory, and identity meet.”
With Costume Art, Bonaveri reaffirms its place among leading cultural institutions, blending craftsmanship, research, and ideas. Rooted in sculpture and open to the contemporary, each figure becomes an interpretation of the body and what it means.
Photos courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
