Akris: #MeToo mode from Mittel-Europe

By

Godfrey Deeny

Published
Mar 5, 2018

Our Anglo-Saxon cousins, quite rightly, have been extolling the importance of the suffragette movements this year, the centennial year of women winning the right to vote. Bravo for Akris’ creative director Albert Kriemler, then, to recall a series of uniquely dynamic women in early 20th century Vienna who were also path-leaders in women’s fight for civil rights.
 

Powerful and clever women who supported avant-garde artists like Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele; massive reproductions of whose works were display as the backdrop for this dynamic show. The latter’s revolutionary drawings presaging a new era for all women and a redefinition of beauty.
 
Ladies like photographer Madame d’Ora and journalist and Francophile Berta Zuckerkandl, who recognized these great painters; and invited to their salons composers like Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg. Though being Austrian, there was a precision to their new thinking, a meticulousness seen in pretty much every look in this collection.

The perfectly judged cut of a stretch denim parka with large practical pockets, or a saddle-stitched mannish suit with matching satin blouse – all of them made in the Schiele’s signature sapphire blue.
 
Elegant and always plausible – just like the curvy cashmere ribbed knit shown with python leather green conical leg pant – again in cyber green, a hue seen in another of the backdrop paintings inside the Palais de Tokyo.
 
Kriemler even captured the exact flare of an abstract print dressing gown worn in an erotic photo of dancer, shot by Madame d’Ora; presented in one of his sketches inside his program, and then gloriously on the runway by marvelous lace cardigan.
 
Women’s liberation in Vienna, a half century before the term first became used.
 
“By 1918, women had won access to university education and the right to vote in many countries. Today, exactly one hundred years later, again in a historic time for women’s empowerment, I want to celebrate the spirit of Vienna in the early 20th century. It is the spirit of freedom; functionalism and self-expression that launched a totally new era for women,” explained Kriemler.

'#MeToo' for Mittel-Europe.