Akris and Thomas Ruff on collaboration, a decade on
To mark the artist's retrospective at Paris Photo, Akris hosted an intimate brunch in its Paris showroom, revisiting the 2014 collaboration that brought Ruff's enigmatic imagery into digital prints, LED embroidery and fabrics of unexpected visual depth.
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Thomas Ruff’s photographs occupy a space between the technical and the human. When Akris approached the German artist around 2013 for a collaboration, the house recognised an alignment: both practices demand absolute clarity of vision and an understanding that innovation emerges from discipline. The collection that emerged in 2014 was rare because fashion and photography did not simply sit beside each other, but genuinely interlocked. This week, as Ruff’s retrospective opens at Paris Photo, Akris returned to that dialogue with an intimate brunch in its Paris showroom, revisiting the garments and the decision that made them possible.
The brunch brought visitors to stand before Ruff’s photographs enlarged and mounted with the clean severity his work demands. The images had entered the Akris collection as digital patterns, transferred onto silk and wool, their tonal range and mysterious depth translated into garments designed to move around the body. What made this collaboration genuinely innovative rather than decorative was the commitment to treating Ruff’s visual language as a technical problem to solve. The house worked with LED embroidery, a technology that allows light itself to become part of the textile, and engineered the fabrics themselves to hold unexpected visual depth, the kind of dimensionality that reads differently depending on light and angle of view.
Ruff, who works often with digital technology and processes that feel modern and distant, retains an almost sculptural quality in his images, a sense of form emerging from shadow. When those images appeared on Akris silhouettes, they carried that same tension: the precision of the technical process and the organic, breathing quality of how fabric responds to a body in motion. For Akris, the collaboration offered a way to push what digital printing could achieve on luxury fabric, to test the possibilities of embroidery as a form of storytelling, to explore how a garment could carry an image not as decoration but as content. The showroom brunch functioned as a kind of counterpoint: a moment to see how a photographer’s vision had moved beyond the frame, how his formal language had become wearable, how the collaboration had created something that existed in the space between two different ways of seeing.
Ruff’s photographs, with their strange formal beauty and their refusal to reveal everything at once, seemed a natural match for a house that has always understood that luxury resides not in decoration but in the integrity of construction and the boldness of a clear idea. The artist works often with digital technology, with processes that feel modern and somehow distant, yet his images retain an almost sculptural quality, a sense of form emerging from shadow. When those images appeared on Akris silhouettes, they carried that same tension: the precision of the technical process and the organic, breathing quality of how fabric responds to a body in motion.
The 2014 collection was not a one off moment of art fashion crossover, the kind of thing that generates a press release and then evaporates. It represented a deeper alignment between two practices that both demand absolute clarity of vision and an understanding that innovation emerges from discipline. For Akris, the collaboration offered a way to push what digital printing could achieve on luxury fabric, to test the possibilities of embroidery as a form of storytelling, to explore how a garment could carry an image not as decoration but as content.
Paris Photo runs until November 15, with Ruff’s retrospective offering the full context for this exchange. The Akris showroom brunch functioned as a kind of counterpoint: a moment to step back and see how a photographer’s vision had moved beyond the frame, how his formal language had become wearable, how the collaboration had created something that existed in the space between two different ways of seeing. That conversation, it seems, is worth returning to.
Imagery courtesy of Akris (@akris).
