One early trend of the Pre-Fall season is designers finding inspiration in great female artists—of the heralded variety and the less so. Akris’s Albert Kriemler belongs to the latter camp. He came across the street photography of Vivian Maier, whose backstory is as sublime as her work, through the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York and the documentary Finding Vivian Maier. A nanny who took more than 100,000 pictures, almost all unpublished during her lifetime, Maier was “discovered” in 2007, when boxes of her negatives were sold at a Chicago auction house.
In addition to street photography, Maier took many self-portraits—of her shadow on buttercup-dotted grass, of her reflection in shop windows—and Kriemler has incorporated them into his new collection. He has long been a proponent of photo prints, but he’s never approached them in such a tongue-in-cheek way. A sleeveless shift and a blouson top, for example, bore the photographer’s selfies from the neck down, trompe l’oeil style. Finding Vivian Maier, indeed. The opening dress with its fit-and-flare silhouette, meanwhile, was lifted from her everyday uniform, although you can bet that Akris’s cotton poplin grass print is finer than anything Maier wore.
Rounding out the collection were the kinds of hardworking wardrobe pieces that have made Akris a go-to brand for women of a certain power and income bracket. Slim, simply cut pantsuits came in black seersucker and a lightweight denim; a shirtdress picked up the photography motif with an enlarged black-and-white pixel print; and a little black dress with sheer panels at the sides will be sold with an accompanying 3/4-sleeve top. Together they’re office appropriate; take the top off and you’re ready for cocktails and dinner.
