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\u201cYou\u2019ve either got or you haven\u2019t got style,\u201d goes the old Sammy Cahn lyric. \u201cIf you\u2019ve got it, you stand out a mile.\u201d Iris Apfel, with her signature oversized glasses and distinctive outfits\u2014who died today in Palm Beach\u2014stood out a mile, and then some.<\/p>\n
The centenarian wore her age well. On the occasion of her 100th birthday, the indefatigable fashion influencer and style icon posted an Instagram slideshow displaying things she was older than. These included: the Cyclone roller coaster, the Chrysler Building, Rockefeller Center, and the Empire State Building. Within the fashion world, she was\u2014in a word\u2014a monument.<\/p>\n
In September 2022, at the age of 101, she posted her thoughts on fashion versus style to her more than two million social media followers. They are \u201ctwo entirely different things,\u201d she said. \u201cYou can easily buy your way into being fashionable. Style, I think, is in your DNA. It implies originality and courage. The worst that can happen is you can fail, and you don\u2019t die from that.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was certainly in her DNA. In Iris<\/em><\/a>, Albert Maysles\u2019s 2014 award-winning documentary, Apfel recalled<\/a> being taken aside by Loehmann\u2019s department store founder Frieda Loehmann, who told her, \u201cYoung lady, I\u2019ve been watching you. You\u2019re not pretty and you\u2019ll never be pretty, but it doesn\u2019t matter. You have something much better. You have style.\u201d Her philosophy that \u201cmore is more and less is a bore\u201d made her a self-described \u201caccidental icon\u201d (which is also the title of her 2018 memoir) and \u201cgeriatric starlet.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2005, the Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted an exhibition of Apfel\u2019s clothes. \u201cRara Avis: Selections from the Iris Apfel Collection\u201d presented 40 of her sartorially striking accessories and ensembles. In Maysles\u2019s documentary, Harold Koda,<\/strong> the curator in charge of the Costume Institute at the time, noted, \u201cShe\u2019s an artist. What she uses all of her clothing and accessories to do is compose a new vision. That, to me, is creativity.\u201d<\/p>\n Apfel was an American original. Martha Stewart<\/strong> once dubbed her \u201ca legendary collector of fashion\u201d\u2014part archivist, part aesthete, part social anthropologist. Apfel radically juxtaposed high and low fashion, as The Met noted: \u201cDior haute couture with flea market finds, 19th-century ecclesiastical vestments with Dolce & Gabbana lizard trousers. With remarkable panache and discernment, she combines colors, textures, and patterns without regard to period, provenance, and, ultimately, aesthetic conventions.\u201d<\/p>\n She described her personal style to Vogue<\/em><\/a> in 2022: \u201cIt\u2019s big and it\u2019s bold and it\u2019s a tangible expression about how I feel about things.\u201d One thing it was not, she emphasized, was planned. \u201cI just do it unconsciously,\u201d she said. \u201cIt is a creative exercise that I seem to do every day.\u201d<\/p>\n Apfel was born Iris Barrel in New York City on August 29, 1921. An only child, she wrote in her memoir that she began buying her own clothes when she was 12. She credits her grandmother with first igniting her creative spark by giving her fabric swatches to play with at family gatherings. \u201cMy eyes popped,\u201d she told Vogue<\/em>. \u201cShe said, \u2018Look, you can play with all these scraps\u2014just play and do whatever you want with them, and at the end of the day, if you\u2019ve had a good time and you like them, I\u2019ll let you take home six pieces of your choice.\u2019 It was the entrance to my life in the textile world. I had the time of my life. It was so exciting for me to put colors together. It was my first dose of how it feels to be creative. I must have been about five years old.\u201d<\/p>\n