Iris Apfel, a New York socialite and interior designer who, late in life, knocked the socks off the world of heterosexual fashion with a sassy bohemian style that mixed hippie vintage and haute couture, finding treasures at flea markets and reveling in contradictions, died on Friday at her home in Palm Beach, Florida. She was 102 years old.
Stu Loeser, a spokesman for her estate, confirmed her death.
Calling herself a “geriatric starlet,” Ms. Apfel set trends in her '80s and '90s with loud, irreverent ensembles: a boxy, multicolored Bill Blass jacket with tinted Hopi dance skirt and hairy goatskin boots; a fluffy evening coat made of red and green rooster feathers with suede trousers slashed to the knees; a pink angora sweater set and a 19th century Chinese brocade panel skirt.
Her intentionally disjunctive accessories might include a jeweled mask or a jade bead necklace swinging to her knees, a tin handbag shaped like a terrier, furry scarves wrapped around her neck like a pack of pythons, and almost always her signature armloads full Bracelets etc. Owl-like glasses as big as saucers.
She was tall and thin, with a short coiffure of silver hair and scarlet cuts on her lips and fingernails, a little old lady among Fashion Week models and a real Noo Yawk haggler in a store in Harlem or a souk in Tunisia. Many called her gaudy, crazy, bizarre, even vulgar in getups like a gold-tipped duck feather cape and fuchsia satin thigh-high Yves Saint Laurent boots.
But she was right.
“If you don't dress like everyone else, you don't have to think like everyone else,” Ms. Apfel told The New York Times' Ruth La Ferla in 2011, while she was appearing on national television selling scarves. Bangles and beads of your own design on the Home Shopping Network.
For decades starting 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 in the White House. The Apfels searched museums and bazaars around the world for textile designs. She also regularly expanded her vast wardrobe collection in her Park Avenue apartment in Manhattan.
The Apfels sold their company and retired in 1992, but she continued to serve as a consultant to the company and was the otherworldly woman in town, an aspiring free spirit known in society and among fashion insiders for defying the dictates of the United States ignored the runway and opted for her own artfully contrasting styles.
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: to host an exhibition of her clothing. The Met had previously exhibited pieces from designer collections, but never an individual's wardrobe.
The exhibition “Rara Avis: Selections from the Iris Apfel Collection” brought together 82 ensembles and 300 accessories in the museum's Costume Institute: 1930s Bakelite bangles, Tibetan cuff bracelets, a tiger-print travel outfit she designed herself, a Mongolian husky coat Lamb and Squirrel by Fendi displayed on a mannequin crawling out of an igloo.
“This is not a collection,” Ms. Apfel said. “It’s a raid on my closet. I always thought that to show the Met you had to be dead.”
Harold Koda, the curator who co-organized the exhibition, said: “To dress this way you have to have a keen visual sense. It takes courage. I keep thinking: Don’t try this at home.”
Soon the show was the talk of the town. Under a torrent of publicity, art, design and social history students crowded into the galleries along with the limousine company crowd, busloads of tourists and classes of chattering children. Carla Fendi, Giorgio Armani and Karl Lagerfeld were thrilled.
“A rare museum look at a fashion arbiter, not a designer,” the Times called the show, adding: “Her approach is so inventive and bold that it has rarely been seen since Diana Vreeland graced the pages of hers has put an exotic stamp on Vogue.”
Almost overnight, Ms. Apfel became an international pop fashion celebrity—featured in magazine spreads and advertising campaigns, toasted in columns and blogs, and in demand at lectures and seminars. The University of Texas appointed her as a visiting professor. The Met show traveled to other museums and, like a rock star, attracted thousands to its public appearances.
After the 2007 release of “Rare Bird of Fashion: The Irreverent Iris Apfel,” a coffee-table book by photographer Eric Boman about her wardrobe and jewelry, mobs showed up at her book signings.
Iris, a documentary film directed by Albert Maysles, premiered at the New York Film Festival in 2014 and was seen by enthusiastic cinema audiences in America and the UK in 2015. Film critic Manohla Dargis of The Times called it a “persistent rejection of monocultural conformity” and “a delightful eye-opener about life, love, statement glasses, bracelets the size of tricycle tires and the art of creating the greatest 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 began a collaboration with start-up WiseWear. A year later, Mattel created a unique Barbie doll based on her image. It wasn't 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 world 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 store, 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 practice.
In 1948 she married the advertising expert Carl Apfel. 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 in 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 from a Luis Buñuel film: porcelain cats, stuffed animals, statues, ornate vases, gilded mirrors, artificial fruit, stuffed parrots, paintings by Velázquez and Jean- Baptiste Greuze, a mannequin on a bouquet.
Fashion designer Duro Olowu told The Guardian in 2010 that Ms. Apfel's work had a universal quality. “This is not a trend,” he said. “It brings a certain kind of joy to everyone.”