The Clothing Architect

A fashion designer with an exemplary track record, Albert Kriemler is also a great lover of art. The creative director of the house of Akris has opened, for us, the doors to his universe, two steps away from Lake Constance.

“If I hadn’t become a fashion designer I would have studied architecture.” One needs to get into an Akris dress to understand that. Impeccable mastery of proportions, perfect harmony between cuttings and material. Albert Kriemler is self-made, in a career spanning 37 years with Akris, a subtle and disarming vocabulary, nourished by the architects Adolf Loos and Sou Fujimoto, by the painter Giorgio Morandi. “Fashion and architecture have a specific goal, they follow rules and require a craft. Not art. I see them as shells for people.” Educated in fashion by his family (the house of Akris was founded by his grandmother, Alice Kriemler-Schoch, in 1922). Albert is just about an adult when he joined the company. “I joined immediately after I finished high school because my father’s right hand ‘died’ after an accident. That young, one obeys. So, I tried to give some ideas.” The young man sketches frantically, explores the history of art and pushes himself to create a feeling, not just style: “To make fashion, before everything one is to create an impressive dress that takes you and makes you feel beautiful.”

L’Officiel India DigitalRead L’Officiel India in the digital libraryEvery issue and every cover story, on TCG Media.Read now

LOW PROFILE

Discreet, pensive, Albert Kriemler preferred, from a very young age, to keep a low profile; “I don’t have time for a public life neither a social network. My motherland, Switzerland, has a culture of discretion which I appreciate a lot. Carmen Herrera, the New York artist, with whom I collaborated for the spring summer 2017 collection, reaffirmed the idea that fame only distracts one from their work.” And even though Akris has been showing in Paris since 2004, the designer has never moved away from Saint Gall, the true turntable of textiles, nestled at the foot of the Glarus Alps: “Saint Gall is the epicentre of handicraft and technology. Teams from the largest fashion houses of Milan and Paris come every season to discover what’s new in the world of textiles. There is a tradition of embroidery in Saint Gall. We work hand in hand with all these innovators, Akris is capable of developing new techniques very quickly.”

MUSIC LOVER AND CONNAISSEUR

So, a homebody, Mr. Akris? “No, I love to travel. Alone, with my family or friends. Only recently I was in Kenya at the Maasai Mara reserve with family; I also went to the inauguration of the new Elbphilharmonie at Hamburg with my friends, the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron who created it.” An insatiable collector, he clears out contemporary art fairs – Art Basel, Frieze, Biennale di Venezia – he also regularly visits the Whitney Museum, the MoMA or the Galleria Palace, his fetish museums. His next destinations? Minneapolis, Bilbao and Miami, where he’d love to visit the Pérez Art Museum. We finish by asking him if he would care for time travel. And once again, he replies with art and logic; “I would probably choose the first ten years of the 20th century. The setting of a tremendous conversation between art, literature, science and music. That’s where modernism began. But for the most part, I’m not someone who looks backwards.”

www.akris.ch

Right: In the creative studio of Akris at Saint Gall. Below: Backstage and the ready to wear spring summer 2017 show in New York.

Addresses at Saint Gall:

The Textile museum, for his unique collection of embroideries and lacing. Vadianstrasse 2, Saint Gall, www.textilmuseum.ch.

The famous university with its solid architecture and open air sculptures. Dufourstrasse 50, Saint Gall. www.unisg.ch.

The library at the millenary abbey of Saint Gall, a UNESCO world heritage site. Klosterhof 6B, Saint Gall. www.st.gallen-bodensee.ch.

The Red Square, an urban space created by Pipilotti Rist, between Akris HQ and the town centre.