Iris Apfel, the White House textile veteran turned saucer-spectacled centenarian style icon, died on Friday at her home in Palm Beach, Florida. The news was confirmed by Stu Loeser, a spokesman for her estate. She was 102.
“I like big and bold and a lot of pizzazz,” Apfel announced in Iris (2014), the Emmy Award-nominated documentary from the late Albert Maysles. The Grey Gardens director trailed Apfel haggling in Harlem (“I’m cheap. What can you do on the coat? Oh, you can do better than that”) and coveting $2 teddy bears and a studded cap for her doting husband, Carl (who died in 2015, aged 100). We see her lambasting modern designers to photographer Bruce Weber (“They don’t sew, they don’t drape, they’re media freaks”), teaching at the University of Texas, collaborating with MAC Cosmetics, and presenting a CFDA Award to designer Alexander Wang.
An Accidental Icon
A self-declared “accidental icon,” straight-talking Apfel modeled for Vogue in 2018, the same year Mattel made a silver-haired Barbie in her name. In 2019, aged 97, she landed a modelling contract with IMG. “I’m very excited. I never had a proper agent,” she told Women’s Wear Daily at the time. After Iris aired on Netflix, Apfel told Vanity Fair: “I’m so delighted with the response, I can’t get over it. They’re carrying on about me as if I invented penicillin.”
With outlandish outfits, ice blue eyeshadow, and ruby red lips, Apfel’s increasingly familiar face appeared front row at runway shows and glistened from newsstands in bell pepper green suits, raspberry coats, turquoise feather boas, and her trusty walking cane. “I’m a total workaholic, but never in my wildest dreams did I think I would be a cover girl in my nineties,” she told The Times of London.
“The essence of Apfel’s art, like that of many of the greatest filmmakers, is the art of montage,” The New Yorker noted in 2015. Or, as she would have put it: “More is more and less is a bore.”
In 2005, 13 years after leaving Old World Weavers, the fabric business she founded with Carl in 1950, the Russian-American retiree rolled into her new world as a “geriatric starlet” with more splendor than a Fabergé feast. While restoring fabrics and furniture for the White House under nine presidents, from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton (“I was a busy bee”), Apfel rustled up monikers from the “First Lady of Fabric” to “Our Lady of the Cloth,” but it was the way she dressed herself, and not interiors, that finally landed her in the spotlight.
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