Rare is the season that Albert Kriemler doesn’t choose an artist collaborator, but rarer still is the one that he nominates someone as closely aligned to his own aesthetic as Reinhard Voigt. A German artist, Voigt reduces his landscapes and portraits to grids. He’s a man who sees the world in squares.
“Voigt once told me that his motive in art is raising the question of how far reduction can go without abandoning beauty,” Kriemler explained. “I can relate.” The Akris designer thinks like a geometer too. Though his preferred form has tended to be the trapezoid, he took up Voigt’s signature squares for fall, not only printing and embroidering his grid canvases on an array of pieces, but using the square as a pattern-making tool.
The asymmetrical fall of a dress’s hem was the result of sewing two squares together. Sweaters and sweater dresses with cold shoulders were constructed using the same principle. Designers elsewhere have been experimenting with these reduced shapes this season, maybe as a balm for the chaos of our times. For one reason or another, their flat planes flatter our more irregular bodies.
Other pieces were designed more conventionally, and on them Voigt’s paintings became the center of attention, in particular the boldly colorful Drei Teile, a portrait triptych from 1976/77 whose pixelated look anticipated our digital existence by decades. “He was ahead of his time,” admired Kriemler. There was a deep respect for the past here too. A stunning evening dress was made from chiffon woven with tiny squares of glimmering black velvet. Apparently, there’s only one loom left in the world that can achieve the effect.
