Iris Apfel, eccentric New York fashion icon, exhibition subject and Instagram star, died on Friday at the age of 102, it was announced on her official social network account.
“Iris Barrel Apfel, August 29, 1921 – March 1, 2024,” we read in the publication, accompanied by a photo of her in a long, gold-patterned dress and large black glasses. She was still active on the network the day before.
The self-proclaimed “geriatric starlet” from Queens recently signed a collection for H&M after several collaborations with Citroën, Magnum, Happy Socks and MAC. As a form of consecration, she also inspired a Barbie doll based on her image.
With 2.9 million followers on Instagram, the centenarian still attended major fashion designer presentations and strutted in a wheelchair with her bright red smile.
“Dare to be different”
Iris Apfel was born in 1921 into a Jewish family in Queens, New York and studied art history. As an interior designer, she helped renovate the White House for nine presidents, from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton.
For decades, she has amassed a collection of clothing from the greatest designers of the 20th century, which fills two floors of her Park Avenue apartment. In 2005, the Met Museum in New York dedicated a retrospective to this wardrobe. As for her famous jewelry, she said she sourced her supplies from both Tiffany and the bazaars in Harlem.
“One day someone said to me, 'You're not pretty and you never will be.' But it does not matter. You have something much more important: you have style,” she used to say.
In 2016, she was simultaneously the subject of an exhibition at the Bon Marché in Paris and the face of a new advertising campaign by Citroën and Australian ready-to-wear brand Blue Illusion.
This fashionista was the subject of the 2014 documentary Iris, directed by Albert Maysles. In 2015, after 67 years of living together, she lost her husband Carl, a textile industrialist, who died at the age of 100.
As a fan of colorful silhouettes, Iris Apfel urged women to forego the “uniform of black tights or jeans with a sweater, ankle boots and leather jacket.”
His mantra: “Dare to be different.” His secret: never stopping working. “Try new things. Don't be fooled by age and numbers.
Iris Apfel has managed to “master the art of life,” summed up musician Lenny Kravitz on Instagram.