In 2005 Iris Apfel’s life changed. The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York put on an exhibition of her clothes and accessories, entitled Rara Avis, a rare bird. It turned an interior designer into an international style icon at the age of 84. “This is no collection,” Apfel joked at the time. “It’s a raid on my closet. I always thought to show at the Met you had to be dead.”
This is how the New York Times reported the show: “Mrs Apfel, who toots around town in signature bangles and owlish spectacles, is an oddball hybrid: a bird of paradise with a magpie eye for sorting and gathering. A mistress of the disjunctive effect, she likes to combine, as she did for the show, a fluffy couture evening coat made of red and green rooster feathers with red suede trousers slashed to the knees; a discreet rose-coloured angora twin set found in England in the 1980s with a 19th-century Chinese brocade panel skirt, accented with a strand of jade beads that swing down past the mannequin’s knees.”
Backshow at the Desigual fashion show in 2016
Other items among the 82 ensembles and more than 300 accessories on show were a fuchsia-tinted striped rabbit fur coat, worn with rose-colour polka-dot pants, a triple-tier taffeta ballgown from Lanvin, a tin handbag in the shape of a terrier and Bakelite bangles from the 1930s. Harold Koda, who curated it, said: “To dress this way, there has to be an educated visual sense. It requires courage. I keep thinking, don’t attempt this at home.”
Front row at New York Fashion Week in 2016
Previously she had been known in the world of interior design as a expert on textiles who had remodelled the White House for nine presidents. But after 2005 Iris was a self-proclaimed “geriatric starlet” who liked to call herself the oldest living teenager. “I’m not pretty, and I’ll never be pretty, but it doesn’t matter,” she said. “I have something much better. I have style.” She leveraged her new fame skilfully, with a book, a documentary and various collaborations with designers and shops, including an Iris Apfel Barbie doll.
NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 07: Iris Apfel attends the Calvin Klein Collection fashion show during New York Fashion Week on September 7, 2017 in New York City. (Photo by Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images)
She was born Iris Barrel, daughter of a father who dealt in mirrors and an “extremely chic” mother who gave up her legal studies when she became pregnant and instead ran a boutique. “I always say she worshipped at the altar of the accessory,” Iris told Vogue in 2021. “She knew what to do with bits and pieces, and I never saw anybody so clever with a scarf.”
In the same interview she described how, when she was five years old, her grandmother let her play with scraps of fabric. “Just play and do whatever you want with them, and at the end of the day, if you’ve had a good time and you like them, I’ll let you take home six pieces of your choice,” she was told. It was a game that would change the child’s life.
“I didn’t realise at the time, nor did she,” Iris told Vogue, “it was the entrance to my life in the textile world. I had the time of my life. It was so exciting for me to put colours together. It was my first dose of how it feels to be creative.”
Her maternal grandparents laid the foundation of her Jewish life too. They were active members of a synagogue, the Astoria Center of Israel. Her grandfather was the shul’s first gabbai and the family often shared Shabbat dinners with members of the community. In 2020 during a special service, the shul honoured Iris and she established a scholarship named for her grandparents, Abraham and Jennie Asofsky, to assist members in attending and participating in synagogue events. She said she was moved by the occasion: “The synagogue my grandparents helped build and support so long ago – my childhood synagogue which was a formative part of my Jewish foundation.”
What’s more, she celebrated her 101st birthday at another shul, the Hampton Synagogue in the Hamptons. “We were her spiritual home when she was in the Hamptons,” said Rabbi Marc Shneier, “and I think it says a lot that she wanted to celebrate her birthday with us and support our children’s centre.”
Celebrating her 101st birthday at the Hampton Synagogue, in New York
As a young woman she dreamed of being an artist and studied art history at New York University, but worked first as a teacher and then on Women’s Wear Daily. After the Second World War she started trading in antiques and textiles, which led to a career in interior design. She married Carl Apfel in 1948 and in 1952 they set up Old World Weavers, commissioning weavers around the world to create traditional fabrics. Even after they sold the business four decades later she continued to work there as a consultant.
Carl was the love of her life, and the two lived between Park Avenue, New York and a holiday home in Palm Beach that had Christmas decorations all year round. They were too career-focused for children, but never too busy for shopping, although Iris never bought anything at full price, instead picking out sale-price couture samples, and mixing them up with bargains picked up at flea markets.
Her 2017 summer collection at Macy's Presents Fashion Front Row
She owned so many clothes and so many pieces of jewellery — not to mention the stuffed toys and tchotchkes that filled the Apfels’ homes — that it felt unlikely that she’d be able to pick a favourite possession. But she told The Guardian that she had one: “The Wandering Jew ring that belonged to my husband, Carl, is very important to me. We bought it in Dublin on his birthday on 4 August, 1958, and he wore it until he died.”
She was never snobbish about clothes, nor boring, her style was always witty and fun. “I think my closet is full of joy. I try not to put anything in there that I don’t like or have fun with,” she told Vogue. “I like to improvise,” she told the film-maker Albert Maysles when he made a documentary about her in 2015, “try this, try that, as though I’m playing jazz.” It would be easy to think of her as just a flamboyant clothes-horse, a maximalist with a rare talent for combining different elements to make an eye-catching ensemble.
But what made her so popular —on Instagram she had three million followers — was the way her clothes were part of a wider philosophy of life. “When you don’t dress like everybody else, you don’t have to think like everybody else,” she said in 2011. And in 2018: “I try to be happy whenever I can. I don’t fret about what’s past and we don’t know if there will be a future, so I make as much as I can out of what’s here now.”
Huntsman Collection Launch, in New York, in 2012
When her death at the age of 102 was announced this week, Instagram filled up with her image and quotes. “More is more and less is a bore” was one favourite.
Others remembered her wisdom on ageing. “You’ve got to try it. You’ve only got one trip, you have to remember that.” And then there was: “Dress to please yourself. Listen to your inner muse and take a chance. Wear something that says ‘Here I am’ today.”
Farewell, Iris. The world is a greyer, more boring place without you.
