Issue link: https://www.balharbourdigital.com/i/1543791
hen Akris Creative Director Albert Kriemler feels his creative battery flicker, he turns to the rhythms of his hometown, St. Gallen: long hikes in the surrounding mountains and afternoons spent in the glow of the local arthouse cinema. The former Kriemler chalks up to Swiss DNA, yet the latter feels equally Swiss in its preference for the independent and avant-garde. Together, they embody a distinctively artistic sensibility that has long informed Akris, the house—founded by his grandmother, Alice Kriemler-Schoch—that he has led for the past 45 years. These days every fashion brand seems to be talking about independent theater and art, authenticity and luxury's entanglements, collaborations between worlds. Akris has long treated such endeavors not as a revenue tactic but as everyday practice. Under Kriemler, the more than 100-year-old house has cultivated relationships with artists and architects—among them Carmen Herrera, Thomas Ruff, Sou Fujimoto, and Alexander Girard—well before such exchanges became another form of currency within the industry. These partnerships are never decorative: They are embedded into the making of the clothes themselves, shaping fabric development, construction, and proportion. W Akris Creative Director Albert Kriemler finds a kindred spirit in the archives of an abstract icon, reimagining his legacy through a new collection that celebrates the beauty of radical simplicity. BY KAT HERRIMAN beyond That philosophy feels especially resonant as Akris prepares to release its Spring/Summer 2026 collection, in dialogue with the Leon Polk Smith Foundation. A central figure in postwar American abstraction, Smith employed a singular visual vocabulary defined by hard-edged geometry, asymmetry, and an almost musical use of color. Working largely outside the dominant New York School narrative, he forged a path that was at once rigorous and intuitive, precise and deeply personal. His paintings resist hierarchy: forms hover, advance, and recede, never fully resolving, yet always in balance. It is precisely this tension between structure and freedom that makes Smith such a compelling interlocutor for Akris, as well as their shared If-You-Know-You-Know status. For Kriemler, whose design language is built on restraint, architectural clarity, and technical excellence, researching Smith's work offered not a motif to be applied, but a way of thinking about composition, space, and movement that aligned with his own experimentation. The connection between the two is less about visual quotation than shared values: an insistence on integrity, a devotion to expertise, and a belief that abstraction can be deeply human. Ahead of the collection's arrival in stores, we paused to ask Kriemler about this latest collaboration, as well as where his own creative process begins. in the atelier C O U R T E S Y O F A K R I S words A sketch from the Spring/Summer collection by Albert Kriemler (pictured here) BALHAR B O U RSH O P S .CO M