Iris Apfel, eye-catcher with a kaleidoscopic wardrobe, dies at the age of 102

Iris Apfel, a New York society matron and interior designer who turned the straight fashion world upside down late in life with a brash bohemian style that mixed hippie vintage and haute couture, found treasures at flea markets and reveled in contradictions, died Friday at her home in Palm Beach, Florida. She was 102.

Stu Loeser, a spokesman for her estate, confirmed her death.

Ms. Apfel, who called herself a “geriatric starlet,” set trends in the ’80s and ’90s with loud, irreverent ensembles: a boxy, multi-colored Bill Blass jacket with a tinted Hopi dance skirt and furry goatskin boots; a fluffy evening coat made of red and green rooster feathers with knee-length suede trousers; a pink angora sweater set and a 19th century Chinese brocade panel skirt.

Her deliberately separated accessories might include a bejeweled mask or a necklace of jade beads that snakes down to her knees, a tin handbag in the shape of a terrier, furry scarves wrapped around her neck like a pile of pythons and, almost always, her signature armloads of bracelets and accessories. owl-like glasses, as big as saucers.

She was tall and thin, with short silver hair and scarlet cuts on lips and fingernails, a little old lady among Fashion Week models and an authentic Noo Yawk negotiator in a store in Harlem or a souk in Tunisia. Many called her flashy, goofy, bizarre and even vulgar in clothes like a duck feather cape with gold tips and thigh-high fuchsia satin Yves Saint Laurent boots.

But she had a point.

“If you don’t dress like everyone else, you don’t have to think like everyone else,” Ms. Apfel told Ruth La Ferla of The New York Times in 2011 as she was about to go on national television to sell scarves, bracelets and beads of her own design on the Home Shopping Network.

Beginning in the 1950s, Ms. Apfel designed interiors for decades 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 in the White House. The Apfels scoured museums and bazaars all over the world in search of textile designs. She also regularly expanded her vast 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 to the company and remained the alien woman about town, a rising free spirit known in society and among fashion connoisseurs for challenging the dictates of fashion ignores. catwalk in favor of her own artfully clashing styles.

In 2005, faced with the cancellation of an exhibition and looking for a last-minute replacement, the Metropolitan Museum of Art approached her with a bold proposal: to organize an exhibition of her clothes. The Met had exhibited pieces from designer collections before, but never an individual’s wardrobe.

For the exhibition ‘Rara Avis: Selections From the Iris Apfel Collection’, 82 ensembles and 300 accessories were collected in the museum’s Costume Institute: Bakelite bracelets from the 1930s, Tibetan cuff bracelets, a travel outfit with a tiger pattern of their own design, a husky coat of Mongolian lamb and Fendi squirrel, depicted on a mannequin crawling out of an igloo.

“This is not a debt collection,” Ms. Apfel said. “It’s a raid on my closet. I always thought that at the Met you had to show that you had to be dead.

Harold Koda, the curator who helped organize the show, said: “To dress this way you need to have a developed 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 poured into the galleries, along with the limousine association crowd, busloads of tourists and classes of chattering children. Carla Fendi, Giorgio Armani and Karl Lagerfeld took it in.

“A rare look in a museum at a fashion arbiter, not a designer,” The Times called the show, adding, “Her approach is so inventive and brash that it has rarely been glimpsed since Diana Vreeland created her exotic stamped on the pages. from Vogue.”

Almost overnight, Ms. Apfel became an international pop fashion celebrity, appearing in magazines and ad campaigns, toasting columns and blogs, and in demand for lectures and seminars. The University of Texas appointed her a visiting professor. The Met show traveled to other museums and, like a rock star, she drew thousands of people to her public appearances.

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 was seen by enthusiastic film audiences in America and Britain in 2015. The Times film critic Manohla Dargis called it a “sustained rejection of monocultural conformity” and “a delightful eye-opener about life, love, statement glasses, bracelets the size of tricycle tires and the art of making the grandest entrance.” ‘

In 2016, Ms Apfel appeared in a television commercial for the French car DS 3, became the face of Australian brand Blue Illusion and started a partnership with start-up WiseWear. A year later, Mattel created a unique Barbie doll in her image. It wasn’t for sale.

In 2018, she published ‘Iris Apfel: Accidental Icon’, an autobiographical collection of musings, anecdotes and observations about life and style. When she turned 97 in 2019, she signed a modeling contract with global agency IMG.

Iris Barrel was born on August 29, 1921, in Astoria, Queens, the only child of Samuel Barrel, who owned a glass and mirror company, and his Russian-born wife, Sadye, who owned 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.

Their Old World Weavers had restored curtains, furniture, curtains and other fabrics at the White House for nine presidents, from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton.

Ms. Apfel’s apartments in New York and Palm Beach were filled with furniture and trinkets that could have come straight out of a Luis Buñuel film: porcelain cats, stuffed toys, sculptures, ornate vases, gilded mirrors, faux fruit, stuffed parrots, paintings of Velázquez and Jean-Baptiste Greuze, a mannequin on an ostrich.

The fashion designer Duro Olowu told The Guardian in 2010 that Ms. Apfel’s work had a universal quality. “It’s not a trend,” he says. “It appeals to a certain kind of joy in everyone.”