ZURICH — The brand new Akris exhibition at Switzerland’s top design museum is a feast for the eyes and the hands, where visitors can squint at intricately printed sequins, gaze upon dozens of large-scale paintings, photos and sculptures, fondle bolts of woven horsehair, and experience 800-gram cashmere double-face melting on their shoulders.

There are even 3D glasses that make Thomas Ruff’s depiction of Martian landscapes come to life on considered one of his arresting photo works — and on a silk Akris raincoat bearing the identical otherworldly topography.

While timed to the one hundredth anniversary of the St. Gallen-based fashion house and peppered with historical information, the sprawling display on the Museum für Gestaltung Zurich mostly offers a deep dive into Albert Kriemler’s creative process, specializing in the last 15 years, when artistic collaborations and technical wizardry got here to the fore.

Kriemler teamed up with the museum’s curator Karin Gimmi, juxtaposing about 100 Akris outfits with artworks in crisp vignettes harking back to contemporary art galleries.

While designers and fashion brands of all stripes now routinely unfurl tie-ups with buzzy artists, Gimmi noted how Kriemler “never goes with what the art world is talking about without delay” — and he also negotiates the contemporary art scene alone, with none consultant or advisor.

For instance, he has shone a highlight on Reinhard Voigt’s pixelized oil paintings, Cuban-American artist Carmen Herrera’s abstract color planes, and Rodney Graham’s multimedia hijinks, often involving him putting on garments and assuming curious contortions.

What’s more, Kriemler doesn’t simply transpose the art he selects to garments, but lets the works contribute to the structure, proportions, coloration and spirit of his designs, Gimmi explained.

“It’s about his feelings, and he’s really increase a relationship with the people he works with,” she said.

Sometimes, the artists are friends, as was the case with Ruff, whom Kriemler has known for 30 years. The 2 men worked hand-in-hand on their fall 2014 collaboration, which included looks that lit up with LED embroideries.

Several pandemic-era collections are featured, including the spring 2021 collection done with German artist Imi Knoebel.

The Knoebel room ranks as an entire cinematic art-fashion experience, the mannequins lined up diagonally, echoing the metal bars Knoebel tacks to his monumental canvases. The gathering film by Anton Corbijn plays on a facing wall, pulsing with color. “He has a vocabulary of lots of of prepared colours which he mixes,” Kriemler marveled.

The designer noted that department-store executive Burton Tansky, an early champion of Akris within the U.S., coaxed him into using brighter colours by inviting him to Florida, Texas and California in an effort to experience the life-style there.

“I saw what sunlight does to paint,” he said in front of a display of lots of of Akris fabric swatches from the past 40 years. “You’ve to have the proper fabric to make the colour beautiful.”

Architecture can get Kriemler’s creative juices going also, as seen within the Akris spring 2016 collection where Sou Fujimoto’s metal grids are interpreted as intricate guipure embroideries on biker jackets and zippered dresses, while porous roof-scapes were expressed as lean 18-gauge silk knits and diaphanous circle skirts riddled with similar holes, some achieved via laser-cutting.

Because of the Swiss firm’s seasoned seamstresses, Kriemler was capable of translate a picket gate from Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Scottish estate into an arresting column gown, and photos of his ponds into dreamy, watery prints on silk georgette.

Akris’s 480 Swiss employees were among the many first to find the showcase on Wednesday. Pieter Kriemler, Albert’s brother and chief executive officer on the family-owned firm, said your entire company was energized by the project and he felt it vital to present them the V-VIP treatment.

The exhibit open to the general public on Friday and runs through Sept. 24.

“Collections must be realized by passionate people,” the manager said. “Especially after COVID[-19], this exhibition provided an enormous, positive push.”

Over the approaching months the brand’s wholesale and business partners will even be invited to find the display in a vaulted space harking back to a cathedral.

It unfurls thematically, and visitors can dip into the rooms flanking the central nave at their whim. The primary room to the left of the trapezoidal entry portal is devoted to Akris founder Alice Kriemler, who turned out aprons product of the best cottons with beautiful embroideries.

Albert Kriemler recalled how his grandmother’s comportment modified the minute she tied on her apron and headed into the Akris atelier and workshops.

“I used to be at all times concerned that the apron is something very removed from today,” the designer mused. “The corporate began dressing women for his or her day by day work life, and we don’t to do something so different today.”

Gimmi noted that Akris exalts a core belief of Bauhaus scholar Max Bill, whose pondering informs the design museum, situated in a Bauhaus-inspired constructing from the ’30s.

“His goal was to create functional things which are also beautiful, and Akris may be very much in line what with what we stand for,” she said.

Albert Kriemler said he ventured into prints within the mid-2000s on the suggestion of his brother, remembering a small digital printing machine he had encountered at a University of Lucerne campus dedicated to textile studies and research.

The machine allowed him to create photorealistic prints on fabrics, opening a latest creative vista, establishing one other brand signifier for Akris, and making his artistic collaborations highly collectible.

“You usually must try latest things,” Kriemler said, repeating a mantra instilled in him by his grandmother and his father, Max, at all times on a quest to search out or invent essentially the most exceptional fabrics. “Today, I still use several materials he developed.”

Interspersed among the many recent collections are vintage binders cataloging St. Gallen embroideries, charming family photos, early Akris promoting campaigns and an embroidered skirt suit by Cristobal Balenciaga circa Forties, which a 27-year-old Kriemler found at an open-air antique market in Latest York’s Flatiron district.

And considered one of Akris’ best-selling blouses of all time, trimmed with lily of the valley embroidery, circa 1953, can be displayed. The stretch silk chiffon number from the autumn 2002 collection was showcased in a 2006 exhibition mounted by Akris on the Textilmuseum in St. Gallen.

Centenary celebrations kicked off last October with its spring 2023 show, a non-public dinner, and the discharge of the 162-page tome “Akris — A Century in Fashion Selbstverständlich.” (The last word translates to “in fact” in English.)

Anniversary events have unfurled all over the world, including recent repeat shows in Seoul and Tokyo.

What is certain to be one of the popular rooms in the brand new Zurich exhibition hosts a rack of double-face cashmere coats in sizes 2 to 16.

“You’ve to feel what Arkis is all about,” Kriemler said with a smile.