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Iris Apfel, a New York society matron and interior designer who at the end of her life stunned the heterosexual fashion world with a daring bohemian style that mixed vintage hippie and haute couture, found treasures at flea markets and reveled in the contradictions. , died Friday at his home in Palm Beach, Florida. She was 102 years old.
Stu Loeser, a spokesman for his estate, confirmed his death.
Calling herself a “geriatric star,” Ms. Apfel, in her 80s and 90s, set trends with loud, irreverent ensembles: a multi-colored Bill Blass boxy jacket with tie-dyed Hopi dance skirt and furry goatskin boots ; a fluffy evening coat of red and green rooster feathers with suede trousers cut to the knees; a pink angora sweater set and a 19th century Chinese brocade paneled skirt.
Her deliberately disjunctive accessories might be a jeweled mask or a jade bead necklace hanging to her knees, a tin terrier-shaped purse, furry scarves wrapped around her neck like a bunch of pythons, and, almost always, her trademark Arms full of bangles and bracelets. Owl glasses, big as saucers.
She was tall and thin, with a short shock of silver hair and scarlet cuts on her lips and nails, an old lady among the Fashion Week models and a real Noo Yawk haggler in a Harlem store or a Tunisian souk. Many called her flashy, eccentric, strange and even vulgar in outfits such as a gold-tipped duck feather cape and thigh-high fuchsia satin boots by Yves Saint Laurent.
But she was right.
“When you don’t dress like everyone else, you don’t have to think like everyone else,” Apfel told Ruth La Ferla of the New York Times in 2011, when she was about to appear on national television, selling scarves. bracelets and beads of her own design at Home Shopping Network.
For decades, beginning in the 1950s, Ms. Apfel designed interiors for private clients such as Greta Garbo and Estée Lauder. With her husband, Carl Apfel, she founded Old World Weavers, which sold and restored textiles, including many from the White House. The Apfels scoured museums and bazaars around the world in search of textile designs. She also regularly expanded her enormous wardrobe collections in her Park Avenue apartment in Manhattan.
The Apfels sold their company and retired in 1992, but she continued to act as a consultant for the firm and be the woman from another world, a free and soaring spirit known in society and among fashion insiders for ignoring the dictates of fashion. fashion. she catwalks in favor of her own styles ingeniously opposing hers.
In 2005, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, faced with the cancellation of an exhibition and looking for a last-minute replacement, approached her with a bold proposal: mount an exhibition of her clothing. The Met had displayed pieces from designer collections before, but never an individual’s wardrobe.
The exhibition, “Rara Avis: Selections from the Iris Apfel Collection,” brought together 82 outfits and 300 accessories at the museum’s Costume Institute: Bakelite bracelets from the 1930s, Tibetan bracelets, a tiger-print travel suit designed by herself, a husky Mongolian lamb and squirrel coat from Fendi displayed on a mannequin crawling from an igloo.
“This is not a collection,” Apfel said. “It’s an assault on my closet. “I always thought that to show at the Met you had to be dead.”
Harold Koda, the curator who helped organize the show, said: “To dress this way, there has to be an educated visual sense. It takes courage. I keep thinking: don’t try this at home.”
Soon the show was the talk of the town. Under an avalanche of publicity, students of art, design and social history crowded into the galleries along with the throngs of limousines, busloads of tourists and classes of chattering children. Carla Fendi, Giorgio Armani and Karl Lagerfeld absorbed it.
“A rare museum look at an arbiter of fashion, not a designer,” the Times called the exhibition, adding: “Its approach is so inventive and daring that nothing like it has rarely been glimpsed since Diana “Vreeland put his exotic stamp on the pages.” from Vogue.”
Almost overnight, Apfel became an international pop fashion celebrity: she appeared in magazine articles and advertising campaigns, provided columns and blogs, was in demand for conferences and seminars. The University of Texas named her a visiting professor. The Met exhibition traveled to other museums and, like a rock star, attracted thousands to her public appearances.
The mobs showed up for her bookstore signings after the 2007 publication of “Rare Bird of Fashion: The Irreverent Iris Apfel,” a coffee table book about her wardrobe and jewelry by photographer Eric Boman.
“Iris,” a documentary by Albert Maysles, premiered at the New York Film Festival in 2014 and in 2015 was seen by enthusiastic audiences in the United States and Great Britain. Film critic Manohla Dargis of The Times called it an “insistent rejection of monocultural conformity” and “a delightful revelation about life, love, flashy glasses, bracelets the size of tricycle tires and the art of making the grand entrances.” ”.
In 2016, Ms Apfel appeared in a television commercial for the French car DS 3, became the face of Australian brand Blue Illusion and began a collaboration with start-up company WiseWear. A year later, Mattel created a unique Barbie doll in her image. It was not for sale.
In 2018, she published “Iris Apfel: Accidental Icon,” an autobiographical collection of reflections, anecdotes and observations on life and style. When she turned 97 in 2019, she signed a modeling contract with the global agency IMG.
Iris Barrel was born on August 29, 1921 in Astoria, Queens, the only child of Samuel Barrel, owner of a glass and mirror business, and his Russian wife, Sadye, owner of a fashion boutique. Iris studied art history at New York University and art at the University of Wisconsin, worked for Women’s Wear Daily, apprenticed with interior designer Elinor Johnson, and opened her own design firm.
She married Carl Apfel, an advertising executive, in 1948. They had no children. Her husband died in 2015 at the age of 100.
His Old World Weavers had restored curtains, furniture, draperies and other fabrics in the White House for nine presidents, from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton.
Apfel’s apartments in New York and Palm Beach were filled with furniture and knick-knacks that could have come out of a Luis Buñuel movie: porcelain cats, stuffed toys, statues, ornate vases, gilded mirrors, fake fruit, stuffed parrots, paintings. by Velázquez and Jean-Baptiste Greuze, a mannequin on an ostrich.
Fashion designer Duro Olowu told The Guardian in 2010 that Apfel’s work had a universal quality. “It’s not a trend,” he said. “It attracts a certain type of joy in everyone.”