Style on Wednesday
How to be fabulous at every age
There’s a scene in Iris, the new docudrama (the last from the late auteur Albert Maysles) about fashion darling Iris Apfel, in which a woman Apfel has re-styled concedes that “When Iris first picked this out, I thought, ‘Uh oh, she’s crazy. She’s really showing her 90 years’… but I love it.”
Apfel does show her years – all 93 of them – because, fashion It Girl that she is, she refuses to countenance plastic surgery. “God no,” she exclaims in the film. “I’m very opposed… unless God gave you a nose like Pinocchio or you were in some terrible fire. Some very important people I know have come out looking like a Picasso. And for what? Wrinkles? You still end up with scrawny old hands.”
Heaven knows what she makes of the frozen smiles and waxy foreheads of those she meets in what is at least her fourth career. Sharp-eyed and quick with an aphorism, she’s clearly not inclined to bite the manicured hand that feeds her, even though she’s more than smart enough to detect the nervy sycophancy with which so many of them treat her.
Born Iris Barrel in Queens, New York, she initially worked at Women’s
Wear Daily, then the industry bible, before assisting an illustrator. She graduated to interior designer, set up a company with her husband Carl reproducing 18th- and 19th-century textiles, and together they oversaw the restoration of many historically important buildings, including the White House. “Shush,” she gently admonishes Carl, when he embarks on an anecdote about the difficulties they had with Jackie Onassis. “We’re not supposed to talk about that.”
It was in 2005 that her career as the World’s Most Fashionable Octogenarian kicked off. The