Ways to fasten - on August Barron and Beatrice Bonino’s shared gestures.

Bonino has been August Barron’s set designer of choice ever since their “Debutante” collection in 2022: an unruly ball that turned the uptight bourgeois tradition into a celebration of the makeshift. If each season bears the name of a stereotypically feminine character, the status of the August Barron girl remains elusive. In an interview with The Face, the duo describe her as “someone who’s in the middle of going somewhere but never quite there yet, always putting a persona on display”. Starlettes, New York girls and pageant queens all partake in their vocabulary, but never strive to seamlessly blend in. Ball gowns turn into minishorts in the back, pearls act as collars and cardigans stay lifted above the chest. Illegible in their milieu, these girls revel in indeterminacy, failing (and escaping) the rigid standards their names might evoke. 

If you’re familiar with Bonino’s work, you’ll notice her presence in the most fragile of things, forming a beautifully constructed mess that perfectly echoes August Barron’s design approach. Bonino calls it “precious trash”, a testimony of their shared love for collecting bits and scraps that could’ve easily remained forgotten without their repurposing talent. In the process of resurrection, these pieces take on an uncanny feel, where memorabilia enters the realm of our contemporary concerns. Much of August Barron and Bonino’s work has to do with finding ways to fasten shapes and materials that resist one another. In that sense, their visual language often features the remnants of this fight. 

“Downtown Girl” installation at DSMP, set design by Beatrice Bonino (from @augustbarron IG)

August Barron, “Uptown Girl”, set design by Beatrice Bonino, shot by Laia Bonastre

In their installation for Dover Street Market Paris last year, two mannequins held by the hand strained to keep each other standing. Frozen mid-gesture, the pair was surrounded by stacks of glitter, broken pearls and other artifice of glamour. Bonino’s approach to set design is one of sewing memory through residues thoughtfully scattered around the space. For the label’s “Uptown Girl” collection, she packaged the runway in plastic filled by confetti, cigarette butts and deflated balloons. These subtle details entice us to piece together the tale of their undoing, while resisting a fixed narrative. This is what José Esteban Muñoz calls ephemera: “it is all those things that remain after a performance, a kind of evidence of what has transpired, but certainly not the thing itself”. Following their traces is a gratifying pursuit, as they seem to lead us towards new modes of becoming.

“Downtown Girl” collection visuals shot by Sharna Osborne, set design by Beatrice Bonino (from @augustbarron IG)

In the Winter 2025 Issue of Dazed, Caroline Polachek told Bror August Vestbø and Benjamin Barron that “[their] work ought to be considered within the remit of contemporary art”, to which the duo answered, “We always strive to create something familiar but not placeable”. It’s in an identical fashion that Bonino’s art practice is often described. In a talk for her latest exhibition, In the Main, In the More at Fondation Pernod Ricard, curator Catherine David recalls being drawn to her work, because its structure escaped her understanding. Bonino’s artworks are greatly informed by her training as a researcher in Sanskrit, where she’d translate texts on the verge of disparition. In the act of translation, meaning oscillates between gain and loss, and one has to find a way to accurately pin it. This act resonates with a designer’s gestures, editing patterns and silhouettes until something that feels right emerges. 

In August Barron’s case, it's the illusion of the undone that demands meticulous construction. When looking at their clothes in Dover Street Market, their capacity to freeze movement in place works so well that you’d expect it to throw off the hanger’s balance. 

August Barron (then ALL IN), Sliced Velvet midi dress

Cristina Stolhe

August Barron is preceded by their magazine ALL-IN, through which they first started making clothes by altering vintage pieces they’d collected in flea markets over the years. Each issue is held by an ephemeral packaging, be it tights or pink plastic wrap, fastened by construction tape or pins sporting Britney Spears’ face. Once opened, it reveals volatile pages, free to be reassembled to our own liking – styled, per se. It’s only recently that they started thinking about making products that could be worn out without the help of the ubiquitous tools stylists keep in their pockets. The makeshift aspect of their editorial practice remains in their philosophy, but has been tailored and refined to last beyond the bubble of the shooting set.

Beatrice Bonino, Senza titolo, 2023. Photo by Diego Villareal

ALL-IN n°7, “En Vogue”

Meanwhile, in the gallery space, Bonino’s sculptures play with this very notion of functionality. She started sourcing her materials in Turin hardware stores; by being a loyal customer (and seen as a little funny), she gained the trust of shop owners to take her backstage, where piles of deadstock construction supplies from the 70s lay dormant. Yellowed and rumpled by time, plastic bags and silicone sheets are used for the first time in her work, bearing the fragility of decades-long discardment. When looking at her sculptures, their status appears uncertain and nearly impossible to decipher. Catherine David calls them states – brief and ephemeral, her works are constructed from fragments that could just as well be undone by their coming together. It’s in this sense that Bonino’s practice intertwines with August Barron, where ways to fasten leave room for falling apart. Preservation and evanescence are constantly negotiated, tightening the gap between disposability and preciousness. 

Beatrice Bonino, Senza Titolo, 2023, from If I did, I did, I die at Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery

A recurring motif of fastening in Bonino’s work has been the use of ribbons, a shape that oversaturated the market in 2023’s generalised coquette-ification. While it can be tempting to associate this pattern with the past trend, ribbons bear no aesthetic significance in her work: to Bonino, they’re simply one of many ways to fasten things. As Emma Leigh Macdonald noted in PIN-UP when covering Bonino’s American solo debut at Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery, “much of her interest in fastening is in attaching memories to the space”. The most mundane things are hardly ever neutral, and paying closer attention to the symbols we've attached to them reveals the artificiality of our constructs. 

August Barron, “Real Housewife” Look 28, Photograph by Pascal Gambarte

August Barron, “Real Housewife” Look 34Photograph by Pascal Gambarte

This is particularly true of her latest set design for August Barron’s SS26 Real Housewife collection, where the show playfully reinterpreted the stereotypes of domesticity. Taking inspiration from theater staging, the models faced the audience in an old-school suburban living room decor. The few objects it featured were enough to evoke a narrative of femininity we know too well: a floral-pattern couch, a table lamp, a vase of roses and (beware!), a flat iron table. The label’s housewives performed domesticity in a dishevelled fashion, wearing rolls in their hair and cardigans as headscarves. Their theatrically slanted gestures both complemented the designs’ undone state and subverted the decorum expected within Bonino’s suburban setting. At its best, fashion is theater, and August Barron’s love for character building takes great care in dismantling conservative traditions. This is what performance is known for: it extracts the tensions of our time, engaging us to envision something else. August Barron and Bonino’s works seem to exist in an in-between state, where what we’re used to no longer serves its purpose. Instead, it appears to be imbued with a renewed sense of possibility. Ultimately, the housewives took their chance, breaking through the fourth wall to touch the attendees’ faces with a harsh caress.

In Utopia In Performance, Jill Dolan writes the following: “I do believe that the experience of performance, and the intellectual, spiritual, and affective traces it leaves behind, can provide new frames of reference for how we see a better future extending out from our more ordinary lives.” This is what August Barron and Beatrice Bonino do – by repurposing mundane artifacts into works of art, they revitalize the symbolism therein. Trash becomes a precious token to preserve, feminine stereotypes are turned upside-down. Both understand that perfection is a standard that confines more than it serves. Therefore, their center stage is exclusive to the odd and dismissed. Reverence is shown to the almost-nothings, bows and confetti seeming to hint at queerer narratives. August Barron and Beatrice Bonino’s states-of-undoing seek no resolve. Instead, age-old symbols are perpetually refastened, dismantling the familiar to make space for anticipation.