Museums & Exhibitions

Bonaveri works with museums and curators across the globe, bringing to life the creative narrative for some of the world's most exciting exhibitions.

Museums & Exhibitions

Bonaveri works with museums and curators across the globe, bringing to life the creative narrative for some of the world's most exciting exhibitions.

Dressed Schläppi female mannequins on a stage with a red background

Every exhibition tells a unique story through a carefully curated narrative.

Museums have been borrowing Bonaveri figures for decades. A good mannequin carries the clothes without competing with them, and the Schläppi mannequin, developed in Switzerland in the 1950s and 60s and part of Bonaveri since 2000, has been a fixture of the Costume Institute’s exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for around fifty years. The newer collections, Tribe and the Sartorial Atelier busts, now appear alongside it — in Milan, Rome, Singapore and beyond.

A series of mannequins on platforms in a gallery — Distinction, Gallery View.
Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

At the Met, recent Costume Institute shows include “Camp: Notes on Fashion” in 2019, which used 147 customised Schläppi and Tribe mannequins; the two-part “In America” across 2021 and 2022; “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty” in 2023, with 160 mannequins set among Tadao Ando’s installation; and “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” in 2025, where seventy-five Tribe figures carried the clothes, six of them with sculptural heads inspired by the Brooklyn artist Tanda Francis.

In Italy, the MAXXI in Rome built “Memorabile. Ipermoda” (2024) around fifty-five Bonaveri Sartorial mannequins, with work by Armani Privé, Balenciaga, Bottega Veneta, Bulgari, Dolce & Gabbana and Prada. Bonaveri was the technical partner for “Cristóbal Balenciaga – Shoes from Spain Tribute” at Palazzo Morando in Milan (2025), and the Galleria 10 Corso Como showed Yohji Yamamoto’s “Letter to the Future” (2024) on the Atelier sartorial busts. Milan had earlier hosted Etro’s “Generation Paisley” (2018), with fifty plaster-finished Schläppi mannequins, and Roberto Capucci’s “Metaphors” at the Triennale (2021).

Further afield, the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore put Guo Pei’s couture on Schläppi 2200 mannequins in 2019, including the gold cape Rihanna wore to the 2015 Met Gala, and used a hundred matte-black Schläppi figures for the Andrew Gn retrospective in 2023. In Frankfurt, the Museum für Angewandte Kunst showed “Jil Sander: Present Tense” (2017) on dozens of linen-covered Bonaveri bust forms.