For Akris’s 100 birthday, Albert Kriemler put on a show at the Palais de Tokyo, with a 2011 Ugo Rondinone rainbow sculpture proclaiming We Are Poems arching over the pools. Kriemler has a strong affinity for art, and he said he worked months negotiating the loan; the agreement was just finalized this morning. For the finale, he made chiffon dresses in each color of Rondinone’s rainbow, and another in a creamy beige with rainbow stripes on the inside of its vertical pleats. He often works with artists on the collections, but given the important milestone, he took himself for a collaborator this season.
Akris, for those who missed its first century, is a Swiss company renowned for the fine quality of its fabrics. Beyond his strong connections with artists, Kriemler has a reputation for exacting designs and a minimalist’s eye for embellishment. He has no social media presence; timelessness, not viral trends, is what he’s after.
For the celebration, he selected nine pieces from the company’s archives to walk the runway (in the selling showroom, there are reeditions). “I was so impressed [by] how modern my clothes look today,” he said. The double-face cashmere coat that opened the show dates to 1978; a black single-face cashmere trench from two years later. They handily made Kriemler’s point about the timelessness of Akris’s products, but if you couldn’t pick the vintage pieces out of the lineup, that’s partly because he lifted some of the motifs and applied them elsewhere; the large gold buttons that appear throughout the collection were taken from a circa 1979 navy cashmere caban.
Also interesting was a gabardine suit in twisted wool from 1993. He explained, “I have to redo it and I don’t really know if we’ll succeed, because these yarns just don’t exist anymore.” He had a similar challenge re-creating a lace from the 1980s: “The original lacemaker asked for six months to reproduce it.” That these resources and skills are fading with the passing of time is perhaps not surprising—we live in a fast-fashion world—but it is sad.
So it was cheering to hear the story behind the collection’s multicolored hearts. The hearts were the first print made by the Como-based manufacturer Gianpaolo Ghioldi for Akris. At first Ghioldi was wary about Kriemler’s request to work together. In the late ’80s, when Kriemler came knocking, Ghioldi only supplied to couturiers. But eventually Kriemler won him over. Today, Ghioldi’s son runs the company, and it’s the base for all of Kriemler’s digital prints. What comes around, goes around—hearts, rainbows, and vintage Akris.
