A style goddess for the Internet age
95-year-old fashion maven mixes high-end looks, haute bargains
Iris Apfel is a natural performer. Drawing energy from a private assemblage of clients and media seated on little fashionshow chairs in third floor suite in Holt Renfrew on Tuesday night, she sweeps into the room and the clack of her voluminous layers of gigantic beads and armfuls of oversized bangles can be heard over the wave of “Ooohs” and “Aahs” and “You Go Girls.”
The 95-year-old fashion icon for the Internet age only found her broader spotlight in 2005, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art presented a smash-hit exhibition of her fashion collections. She is known by her signature enormous owl glasses, of which she pulls out one of her own handy one-liners to put the crowd at ease, “The bigger to see you with!”
The longtime muse of the New York Times street style photographer Bill Cunningham (who died earlier this year) has become an unlikely star of advertisements and Instagram since the Met show. Over the past decade, she has been creating a bold-hued lipstick line for M.A.C, a handbag line, a jewelry line for Home Shopping Network, bagging a teaching position in Texas and making numerous appearances as herself for retrospectives of her lifetime of style from Paris to Palm Beach.
Apfel was in Toronto this week for two days of appearances on behalf of Atelier Swarovski (her role is described as friend of the brand), to herald the arrival of their holiday collection, this season featuring pieces commissioned from international designers Peter Pilotto and Rosie Assoulin, exclusively in-store at Holt Renfrew.
A public appearance at the Bloor St. store, mobbed by more of her fervent style groupies, followed on Wednesday evening.
“Jewelry is the most transformative accessory going,” she says. “You can take a little black cashmere sweater and trousers, and with accessories you can go from office to gala. Jewelry does it all. It’s personal, you buy it because you like it, and it doesn’t go in and out of fashion like clothes.”
Sounds practical, but Apfel is anything but. Her maximalist motto is best on display in the 2014 film Iris, by the late revolutionary documentarian Albert Maysles (who did Grey Gardens and Gimme Shelter with brother David). Maysles follows her around her native New York, where she was born in Queens in 1921 and grew up thrifting and scouring Manhattan bargain mecca Loehmann’s (also now defunct). Apfel is seen enthusiastically haggling with Harlem street vendors for beads alongside images of her wrapping up spangled prizes for preservation. She is a couture sample size, she says, which enabled her to get the haute-est bargains over the years.
It is this “high-low” mix of styling that makes Apfel most permanently modern. “If you become too obsessed with fashion, you become uptight,” she quips to the Toronto audience. Apfel is almost as well-known for her tart advice as she is for her extensive collections.
The film also stars Carl Apfel, her husband of 67 years, who died last year a few days before his 101st birthday. Together the two ran Old World Weavers, a firm that reproduced antique textiles. They performed historical restorations at the White House for every president (save Bush Sr.) from Truman through Clinton. Of this she tosses a bomb, “As much as Jackie made out that she did the house, she never did. It is a restoration, not decorating,” instead giving the nod to Mrs. Nixon, “for great taste.”
Their lifetime of travels enabled Apfel to collect broadly for herself as she shopped for work, and contributed to the mash-up of ethnic influences, styles and decades that pioneered her “more is more” look.
“Style,” she says, “is Attitude, Attitude, Attitude. It’s very personal. If you copy it, it’s not style anymore. You have to be original.” She says she dresses with her gut. Interested is interesting, and it is not about pretty. “I’m very visceral about what I do. There are no rules, I hate rules.”
She lards her conversation with charming throwbacks like “smashing” and “pizzazz” and “the outfit was a sensation,” and her enthusiasm is catching. Susie Sheffman is a well-known Toronto fashion stylist, who has included Apfel’s work and spirit in a show at the Design Exchange here in town. She is snapping shots of Apfel and tapping the words of wisdom into her iPhone.
“Her husband was a real fashion enabler,” marvels Sheffman. Imagine how great that must have been? Sheffman loves how Apfel is so “impassioned and emboldened. Older women, they so don’t give a s--t what anybody thinks. It is a joy to see someone so comfortable with themselves, and in their own skin. And her colour sense, is like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
Of her juncture with fame, Sheffman says, “It is a massive accessories moment right now, it is all about Alessandro Michele and Gucci.” As if on cue, Apfel chimes in with what she bought on her Toronto trip. Yes, she’s still shopping: a “drop dead” pair of Gucci pants, and a shirt-dress by her dear pal, Dries van Noten.
Apfel, who has close-cropped hair tinted lavender, has called herself a “geriatric starlet,” also had words about the Millennial generation from her ongoing gig as a visiting prof at the University of Texas. “Students are supposed to be eager and brash and young. Young people today are not. I think they are a bit lazy and spoiled by instant everything. They want to start with the corner office and the red carpet, not the nitty gritty or the dirty work.”
She takes the students around the streets of New York and into the museums. “You cannot learn fashion by reading in a book. You have to apprentice. They want you to give them a road map. But it has to come from you.”
She rails against “carbon copies,” and maps in general. “I have fallen into everything. I never had a plan.”
And she lets you know when a question doesn’t suit her. One in particular: What inspires you?
“Getting up in the morning,” is her deadpan reaction.