Akris. Fashion. selbstverständlich – Albert Kriemler's outstanding exhibition in Zurich

By

Godfrey Deeny

Published
Jun 13, 2023

Few fashion designers have so skillfully interacted with fine artists as Albert Kriemler of Akris, whose dialogue with architects, photographers, sculptors and whole art movements are the leitmotif of a remarkable exhibition currently in Zurich.

Entitled 'Akris. Fashion. selbstverständlich', the exhibition is the second part of a year-long celebration of the brand’s centennial. Albert’s grandmother, Alice Kriemler-Schoch, founded the house in 1922, and her grandson still designs in a building she bought 80 years ago.
 
Founded by the Irish missionary St Gall in the 8th century, St Gallen is the key source of one of fashion’s greatest raw materials – guipure lace. Though it’s perhaps the city’s very distance from London, Milan or Paris which has led Kriemler on such a unique path in fashion design – a series of intense collaborations with fine artists in multiple disciplines. Surely guaranteeing him a prominent place in the opinion of tutored afficionados among the Gotha of great designers in the past half century.

Presented inside the Museum für Gestaltung, Switzerland’s most prestigious design museum, Akris, Fashion, selbstverständlich is laid out in 10 distinctive chapters capturing highlights of Kriemler’s many interactions. Underlining how these partnerships frequently led him to invent entirely new fabrics to best express his ideas. Selbstverständlich, incidentally, means effortless – not the first time an English ear would winch at the German’s bizarre sense of onomatopoeia. 
 
The exhibition is in part an ode to the family’s hometown of St Gallen, seen in fall-winter 2021, with a beautifully composed video shot by Anton Corbijn during the lockdown of the cast marching on a winter path above the city. The city's street-grid and 19th century map prints became beguiling prints used in hooded neoprene hoodies; gathered silk shirts dresses and hyper collectible leather totes. That bag even features a small stud, marking the building where Albert works.
 
“At that moment in the lockdown, the freest thing you could do was just go for a walk. So, this promenade was inspired by Der Spaziergang, by Robert Walser, probably Switzerland’s greatest writer,” explains Kriemler, in a private tour of the exhibition, as he points to a special edition of Walser’s novel on one wall.
 
Kriemler’s first step into fashion was at a lofty level, being taken as a high school student to his first Yves Saint Laurent show in 1976. Talk about full disclosure – a video of that actual show is also on display.

Somewhat bizarrely, Covid was a moment of intense creativity for Kriemler. Notably his brilliant collaboration with German artist Imi Knoebel, whose streaky phosphorescent canvases with plywood strips led to some bravura fashion. Transported into silk tops, sheathes, pink leather trenches and grain leather bags. Corbijn again shooting the collection video, this time in a Düsseldorf art gallery.
 
A meeting of ideas that came after decades of friendship, as indeed was the case with all Kriemler’s linkups. Unlike most fashion collabs’ – where designers crudely tag team with the latest rapper, athlete or K-pop star.
 
“Many of the artists are Kriemler’s friends; he has followed their work for years if not for decades, until the moment comes when the appreciation of a work and the knowledge of their art inspire his collections,” notes Roland, director of St Gallen’s Kunstmuseum, in the show program.
 
The most elegiac installation is the meeting of Akris and Scottish artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, stemming from a visit to his garden, Little Sparta, near Edinburgh. A classic example of how artistic encounters drive Albert to attempt technically advanced fashion ideas. Kriemler himself shot lily ponds and forest clearings and featured these images in digitally printed and beautifully delicate silk plissé dresses or micro metallic sequin cocktails. While a garden gate at Little Sparta led to an other-worldly handcrafted net silk duchesse lattice gown.
 
A huge fan of modern architecture, Kriemler’s most intriguing partnership is with master Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto. After discovering Fujimoto’s skeletal frame structure for the annual Serpentine exhibition in 2013, Albert played with the form on white grained leather bags. He also developed 3D printed rings and a white mesh biker jacket that referenced Sou’s 2016 metallic cobweb, the Naoshima Pavilion. While a blue see-through plastic jacket plays on Sou’s blue glass wall in the Miami Design District, seen above a Buckminster Fuller geodesic bubble. Even more remarkably, the designer created a perforated white cotton shirt which mimicked Sou’s organic architectural design for the Budapest Music Hall, even before it was built. 
 
“I felt an architect who creates such minimal sensual architecture was just right for my clothes,” explained Kriemler. 
 

Albert’s clothes, thanks to his effortless sense of perfect tailoring, also feel architectural. One can appreciate their special fit in the museum – since a half dozen cashmere coats are hung on a wall ready for visitors to try on.
 
Viennese Modernism, and the women who championed legendary Austrian artists like Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Josef Hoffmann, were the wellspring of his Winter 2018 collection. Just as these ladies discarded their corsets, Albert operated in a free style and a refreshing color palette - malachite green or blue-marble prints. A perfectly judged violet blue pants suits with white saddle stitching from the collection stands out in this chapter, the same look worn by Michelle Obama for her launch of her book Becoming.
 
Teaming up with the naively fantasist textile designer Alexander Girard led to luminous doll print tunics, and dresses in 2018. Looks later worn by Kendall Jenner, opening Akris to the next generation.
 
Though essentially devoted to Albert’s past decade of work, a special place is given to an original apron, a key item for his grand-mother, Alice Kriemler-Schoch, who began by sewing them. And for Albert, who developed the whole Spring-Summer 2022 collection based on the apron – from A-Line pattern slip dresses and sheathes to a modern suit. 
 
“My grandmother was the eighth child of 11 children, from a farmer’s family outside of St Gallen. Here’s the building that she bought which is still the heart of the company. It’s where I still make my collections,” marveled Albert, pointing to a 1950's apron, the garment granny perfected.
 
Few fashion houses anywhere can boast 100 years of family tradition, and of being a star event in Paris Fashion Week, as Akris has been for two decades. Its success and importance built on impeccable craftsmanship and first-rate materials, allied with Albert Kriemler’s rich imagination, and his rare ability for a designer to truly elicit the essential from each artist he works with, without subsuming them to his own will. 

Rarely more so than his designs with master photographer Thomas Ruff. His chromogenic prints of the surface of Mars seen on digitally printed poplin raincoats. His night-vision images of houses taken with the aid of a residual light amplifier appearing on beautifully ghostly double face cashmere coats.
 
“I always discover something unexpected in a Thomas Ruff print, a series of riddles I want to solve. And for me using his work with new digital printing on fabrics for the first time means I am discovering something new again,” explained the gently spoken and eternally polite Kriemler.
 
Moreover, so good is Kriemler’s eye, that the exhibition – without the clothes – would be a brilliant art display, including works by Geta Brătescu, Reinhard Voigt, Carmen Herrera. Akris centennial celebrations had begun with a retrospective show, centered on an Ugo Rondinone arch in the fountain of the Palais de Tokyo.
 
Up the hill from the museum, in Zurich’s strangely elegiac cemetery one encounters another Irish element in Switzerland. The grave of legendary author James Joyce, famed for his epic novel Ulysses. And thinking about it, Kriemler like the Greek hero has set off on a two-decade long Odyssey. But instead of sea monsters and sorceresses, he encountered many of the gods of modern art and design, in order to return home in quiet triumph. Albert’s epic journey through fashion finding recognition with this unique and memorable exhibition.