How Akris Designer Albert Kriemler Lets Art Light Up His Runways

As a teenager, Albert Kriemler grew up traveling to fabric fairs with his family, founders of the Swiss fashion house Akris, and occasionally attending the fashion shows of Yves Saint Laurent, whose legendary art-inspired collections brought Vincent van Gogh, Georges Braque and Piet Mondrian to life on the runway.

Is it any wonder Kriemler, creative director of Akris since 1980, frequently turns to art to nurture his creativity?

His zesty fall 2026 Akris collection, for example, was the fruit of a collaboration with Colombian artist Olga de Amaral, whose large-scale textile works, often covered in gold or silver leaf, emboldened him to stretch beyond his usual comfort zone of luxurious understatement and go all out with shine, color and texture.

He first drew a direct line between his fashions and art with the brand’s first Paris runway show in 2004, which was inspired by the colors of Swiss-French painter Félix Vallotton.

It wasn’t long before Kriemler was collecting art, befriending artists — and occasionally lobbying artists to partner with him on a collection, open-sourcing his creative methods with them.

Kriemler certainly went all-in with de Amaral, visiting the 94-year-old for several days at her home in Bogotá, soaking up her wisdom about her craft.

A Broader Base of Inspiration

“I found out that when you get involved in an artist’s work and how she does art, that you get a much broader base for inspiration. You learn how she thinks about color, how she thinks about light, how she thinks about proportion,” he says.

Such tie-ups have helped unlock Kriemler’s experimental side, perhaps most dramatically with his fall 2014 collection that featured LED-equipped dresses and tailoring, evoking the “Stars” series by acclaimed German photo artist Thomas Ruff.

He recalls with fresh excitement the discovery that fabric house Forster Rohner, based in Akris’ hometown of St. Gallen, was incubating a burgeoning practice in electronic-enabled embroideries.

“It’s always interesting when you can infuse new technologies into the workmanship process, because you create a new appearance,” Kriemler says. “It’s like a new playground.”

While big fashion brands routinely collaborate with blue-chip artists, Kriemler has a knack for rooting out under-the-radar or on-the-cusp talents, always trusting his instincts.

He has shone a spotlight on Reinhard Voigt’s pixelated oil paintings, Cuban-American artist Carmen Herrera’s abstract color planes, and Rodney Graham’s multimedia hijinks, not simply transposing their art onto garments but letting the works contribute to the structure, proportions, coloration and spirit of his designs.

Kriemler was initially drawn to de Amaral’s work because of her penchant for horsehair, a linchpin material for Akris handbags and also sometimes incorporated into jackets.

Martha Jungwirth, the Austrian artist who inspired the Akris spring 2027 collection, drew him in with her “very expressive way of painting” and her use of color.

“But what I loved always is that she works not on white canvas like a lot of artists. She uses a natural linen canvas always, and that’s always part of her work,” he enthuses.

Kriemler first discovered Jungwirth’s paintings at Thaddaeus Ropac about five years ago, traveling expressly to Bilbao, Spain, two years ago just to catch the big Jungwirth retrospective at the Guggenheim there.

Enjoying the Unexpected

The designer visits galleries and art museums whenever he travels, often going one hour before closing to avoid queues, relishing unexpected discoveries, like a Vilhelm Hammershøi exhibition he stumbled upon in 2019 at the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris.

“I’ll never forget that moment: An artist I’d never heard about before, and then you get to see such an exquisite work,” he says.

That said, he has his usual haunts. Here, a roundup of his favorite art destinations, many of them in Switzerland: