Fashion icon was known for eye-catching style, wardrobe
NEW YORK — Iris Apfel, a textile expert, interior designer and fashion celebrity known for her eccentric style, died Friday at her home in Palm Beach, Florida. She was 102.
Her death was confirmed by her commercial agent, Lori Sale, who called Apfel “extraordinary.”
No cause of death was given. It was also announced on her Instagram page Friday, which a day earlier had celebrated that Leap Day represented her 102 birthday.
Born Iris Barrel on Aug. 29, 1921, in New York City, Apfel was famous for her irreverent, eye-catching outfits, mixing haute couture and oversized costume jewelry. A classic Apfel look, for instance, would pair a feather boa with strands of chunky beads, bangles and a jacket decorated with Native American beadwork.
With her big, round, black-rimmed glasses, bright red lipstick and short white hair, she stood out at every fashion show she attended.
Her style was the subject of museum exhibits and a documentary film, “Iris,” directed by Albert Maysles.
“I’m not pretty, and I’ll never be pretty, but it doesn’t matter,” she once said. “I have something much better. I have style.”
Apfel enjoyed late-inlife fame on social media, amassing nearly 3 million followers on Instagram, where her profile declares: “More is more & Less is a Bore.” On TikTok, she drew 215,000 followers as she waxed wise on things fashion and style and promoted recent collaborations.
“Being stylish and being fashionable are two entirely different things,” she said in one TikTok video. “You can
easily buy your way into being fashionable. Style, I think, is in your DNA. It implies originality and courage.”
She never retired, telling “Today”: “I think retiring at any age is a fate worse than death. Just because a number comes up doesn’t mean you have to stop.”
“Working alongside her was the honor of a lifetime. I will miss her daily calls, always greeted with the familiar question: ‘What have you got for me today?,’ ” Sale said in a statement. “Testament to her insatiable desire to work. She was a visionary in every sense of the word. She saw the world through a unique lens — one adorned with giant, distinctive spectacles that sat atop her nose.”
Apfel was an expert on textiles and antique fabrics. She and her husband, Carl, owned a textile manufacturing company, Old World Weavers, and specialized in restoration work, including projects at the White House under six U.S. presidents. Apfel’s celebrity clients included Estee Lauder and Greta Garbo.
Apfel’s own fame blew up in 2005 when the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute in New York City hosted a show about her called “Rara Avis,”
Latin for “rare bird.” The museum described her style as “both witty and exuberantly idiosyncratic.
Her originality is typically revealed in her mixing of high and low fashions — Dior haute couture with flea market finds, 19th-century ecclesiastical vestments with Dolce & Gabbana lizard trousers. The museum said her “layered combinations” defied “aesthetic conventions” and “even at their most extreme and baroque” represented a “boldly graphic modernity.”
The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, was one of several museums around the country that hosted a traveling version of the show. Apfel later decided to donate hundreds of pieces to the Peabody — including couture gowns — to help them build what she termed “a fabulous fashion collection.” The Museum of Fashion & Lifestyle near Apfel’s winter home in Palm Beach, Florida, also plans a gallery dedicated to displaying items from Apfel’s collection.
She married Carl Apfel, an advertising executive, in 1948. They had no children. Her husband died in 2015.