Albert Kriemler is the designer and creative mind behind Akris, a swiss family-owned fashion house. The iconic Ai bag, born in 2010, when Albert launched the first handbag collection of the maison, is made of rarefied and animal-friendly Mongolian horsehair and have a trapezoidal shape to resemble the “A”: the letter signature of the house. For his runway collection, Albert loves to collaborate with contemporary artists like Thomas Ruff (FW 14/15), Carmen Herrera (SS 17) and Rodney Graham (FW 17/18) as well as architects like Sou Fujimoto (SS 16), trying to translate their aesthetic world into fashion products that can be worn or carried.
“On my first visit in 2015 to the new Whitney Museum in New York, I saw a painting I could not take my eyes of. It was ‘Blanco y Verde’, created in 1959, an off-white plane with a green arrow-shaped triangle, by Carmen Herrera, born in 1915 and living in New York. Her sense of color and proportion, a blend of euphoria and perfect order, stunned me.” Albert Kriemler managed to met Carmen Herrera for the first time in May 31 2016 on her 101st birthday. They spoke about their work and he had her approval to design his next collection drawing inspiration from her paintings.
So the first Akris show in New York, in September 2016, of the collection SS 2017, has been dedicated to the work of Carment Herrera.