Iris Apfel, an eccentric New York fashion icon, died on Friday at the age of 102. We can read it on her Instagram account, under a photo of her in a long gold patterned dress and large black glasses. His last post was just two days ago, on February 29th, when he celebrated his “102.5th anniversary.”
The “geriatric starlet” from Queens, as she liked to call herself, recently signed a collection for H&M after several collaborations, including Citroën, Magnum, Happy Calze and Mac. With 2.9 million followers on Instagram, the centenarian fashionista was still attending major fashion events and still presenting in a wheelchair.
Iris Apfel was born in 1921 into a Jewish family in New York and studied art history. As an interior designer, he helped renovate the White House for nine presidents, from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton. He collected clothes from the greatest designers of the 20th century, which took up two floors of his luxury apartment on Park Avenue and to which the Met in New York dedicated a retrospective in 2005.
“One day someone said to me, 'You're not pretty and you never will be, but whatever, you have something much more important: you have style,'” Iris liked to say. In 2016, she was the subject of an exhibition at the Bon Marché in Paris, the face of a Citroën advertising campaign and the Australian ready-to-wear brand Blue Illusion. In 2015, after 67 years together, she lost her husband Carl, a textile industrialist, who died at the age of 100. With her passion for colorful outfits, Apfel urged women to abandon “the uniform of black tights or jeans with a sweater, ankle boots and leather jacket,” so much so that her mantra became, “Dare to be different!”
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