Iris Apfel, who died in March this year aged 102, was one of a kind. At 96 she had already become the oldest person to have a Barbie doll made in her image and was in the rare position of being a centenarian fashion influencer or self-described “geriatric starlet”. In 2005, aged 84, she was the first living person, other than a fashion designer, to have an exhibition of her wardrobe at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, titled Rara Avis.
“Thank you for showing us fashion doesn’t have an age limit,” was one of the tributes paid after her death, by costume designer Charlese Antoinette. Apfel was an interior designer. In 1950 with her husband Carl she founded Old World Weavers, which made luxurious reproductions of historical fabrics that they found on their international travels, everywhere from Capri to Pakistan.
A tiger-striped silk velvet became a hit design, and her restoration projects included The White House. It was after the Rara Avis exhibition that she was catapulted to the status of “accidental icon” of fashion, as the world woke up to her joyful, colourful, maximal approach to style, reflected in her mantra “More is more and less is a bore.” A post shared by Iris Apfel (@iris.
apfel) A post shared by Iris Apfel (@iris.apfel) One of my favourite anecdotes is about how she got her hands on a pair of jeans in an era when women rarely wore them, which shows the power of having confidence in your convictions. She writes that “Wome.