For the spring 2026 Akris collection, Albert Kriemler looked to the midcentury minimalist painter Leon Polk Smith, whose vibrant, geometric works helped defined the Hard Edge style of the 1950s and ’60s. Smith’s 2023 solo exhibition at Zurich’s Museum Haus Konstruktiv inspired the Swiss designer of the family maison to such a degree that Kriemler sought permission from the artist’s estate to re-create Seven Involvements in One, a massive six-paneled, accordion-screen canvas with crisp swirling shapes in a riot of colors. The piece acted as a backdrop and anchor for the entire collection, which faithfully followed the progression of the panels from black and white to blues and reds and closed with a suite of pieces—a leather minidress, slouchy separates, and a diaphanous trench—all featuring the sinuous geometric patterns from the work.
One of Smith’s first major group exhibitions was at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1965; the show was titled “The Responsive Eye,” which is also an appropriate description of Kriemler, who always takes cues from the world around him and the art that speaks to him.
Kriemler explained that Smith once described his work as the opposite of minimal, and that idea resonated with him as a designer whose crisp, clean work has also been described as such. “Akris is about essence, not reduction—about using form and fabric to bring the person into light.” In the skylit atrium of the Palais de Tokyo museum, Kriemler brought the clothes into light. The boldness and brightness of the colors, drawn from Smith’s work but chosen from Kriemler’s grandmother’s color-coding system, developed in the 1940s for fabric hue selection and still used today, was tempered by unexpected textures and silhouettes. A cobalt bomber jacket was rendered in organza, a fire-engine red skirt suit in denim—and evening dresses featured woven, swinging silk threads that looked like the shimmering aluminum curtains in Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, built in 1959 during the heyday of Smith’s career.
Smith may have been a student of the Hard Edge school, but this collection offered just enough softness to make the geometric shapes feel like extensions of the female body rather than constrictions put upon them. The Smith semicircles were interpreted as sporty ruched cutouts on the back of a shirtdress, and trapezoidal shapes turned into organza pleats that floated off the body like piano keys being played.
As Kriemler said of this collection, “It’s not about being minimal; it’s about being essential.” And these clothes do indeed tend to be essential touchstones in the wardrobes of sophisticated women of means around the world. In fact, a friend’s mother, an Akris client, texted me after the show, saying she’d heard I was there. “Didn’t you love it?” she wrote. “I can’t wait to wear it.” This is the secret to Akris: Many devoted fans can’t wait to wear it.
