Iris Apfel, Eye-Catcher With a Kaleidoscopic Wardrobe, Dies at 102

Iris Apfel, a New York society matron and inside designer who late in life knocked the socks off the straight style world with a brash bohemian type that blended hippie classic and high fashion, discovered treasures in flea markets and reveled in contradictions, died on Friday in her residence in Palm Seashore, Fla. She was 102.

Stu Loeser, a spokesman for her property, confirmed her demise.

Calling herself a “geriatric starlet,” Ms. Apfel in her 80s and 90s set developments with clamorous, irreverent ensembles: a boxy, multicolored Invoice Blass jacket with tinted Hopi dancing skirt and bushy goatskin boots; a fluffy night coat of crimson and inexperienced rooster feathers with suede pants slashed to the knees; a rose angora sweater set and Nineteenth-century Chinese language brocade panel skirt.

Her willfully disjunctive equipment may be a jeweled masks or a necklace of jade beads swinging to the knees, a tin purse formed like a terrier, furry scarves wrapped round her neck like a pile of pythons and, almost at all times, her signature armloads of bangles and owlish spectacles, huge as saucers.

She was tallish and skinny, with a brief crop of silver hair and scarlet gashes on lips and fingernails, slightly previous girl among the many fashions at Trend Week and an genuine Noo Yawk haggler at a store in Harlem or a souk in Tunisia. Many known as her gaudy, kooky, weird, even vulgar in get-ups like a cape of gold-tipped duck feathers and thigh-high fuchsia satin Yves Saint Laurent boots.

However she had some extent.

“While you don’t gown like everyone else, you don’t must suppose like everyone else,” Ms. Apfel instructed Ruth La Ferla of The New York Instances in 2011 as she was about to go on nationwide tv, promoting scarves, bangles and beads of her personal design on the House Procuring Community.

For many years beginning within the Fifties, Ms. Apfel designed interiors for personal shoppers like Greta Garbo and Estée Lauder. Along with her husband, Carl Apfel, she based Outdated World Weavers, which offered and restored textiles, together with many on the White Home. The Apfels scoured museums and bazaars around the globe for textile designs. She additionally added frequently to her enormous wardrobe collections at her Park Avenue condominium in Manhattan.

The Apfels offered their firm and retired in 1992, however she continued to behave as a guide to the agency and to be the otherworldly woman-about-town, a hovering free spirit identified in society and to the style cognoscenti for ignoring the dictates of the runway in favor of her personal artfully clashing types.

In 2005, the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, dealing with the cancellation of an exhibition and searching for a last-minute substitute, approached her with an audacious proposition: to mount an exhibition of her garments. The Met had exhibited items from designer collections earlier than, however by no means a person’s wardrobe.

The present, “Rara Avis: Choices From the Iris Apfel Assortment,” assembled 82 ensembles and 300 equipment within the museum’s Costume Institute: Bakelite bangles from the Thirties, Tibetan cuff bracelets, a tiger-pattern journey outfit of her personal design, a husky coat of Mongolian lamb and squirrel from Fendi displayed on a model crawling from an igloo.

“That is no assortment,” Ms. Apfel stated. “It’s a raid on my closet. I at all times thought to point out on the Met you needed to be useless.”

Harold Koda, the curator who helped set up the present, stated: “To decorate this fashion, there needs to be an informed visible sense. It takes braveness. I maintain pondering, Don’t try this at residence.”

Quickly the present was the discuss of the city. Underneath an avalanche of publicity, college students of artwork, design and social historical past crowded into the galleries with the limousine society crowd, busloads of vacationers and courses of chattering youngsters. Carla Fendi, Giorgio Armani and Karl Lagerfeld took it in.

“A uncommon look in a museum at a style arbiter, not a designer,” The Instances known as the present, including, “Her method is so creative and brash that its like has not often been glimpsed since Diana Vreeland put her unique stamp on the pages of Vogue.”

Nearly in a single day, Ms. Apfel turned a global celeb of pop style — featured in journal spreads and advert campaigns, toasted in columns and blogs, wanted for lectures and seminars. The College of Texas made her a visiting professor. The Met present traveled to different museums, and, like a rock star, she attracted 1000’s to her public appearances.

Mobs confirmed up for her bookstore signings after the 2007 publication of “Uncommon Chicken of Trend: The Irreverent Iris Apfel,” a coffee-table guide of her wardrobe and jewellery by the photographer Eric Boman.

“Iris,” an Albert Maysles documentary, opened on the New York Movie Competition in 2014, and in 2015 it was seen by enthusiastic film audiences in America and Britain. The film critic Manohla Dargis of The Instances known as it an “insistent rejection of monocultural conformity” and “a pleasant eye-opener about life, love, assertion eyeglasses, bracelets the dimensions of tricycle tires and the artwork of constructing the grandest of entrances.”

In 2016, Ms. Apfel was seen in a tv business for the French automobile DS 3, turned the face of the Australian model Blue Phantasm, and started a collaboration with the start-up WiseWear. A yr later, Mattel created a one-of-a-kind Barbie doll in her picture. It was not on the market.

In 2018, she revealed “Iris Apfel: Unintentional Icon,” an autobiographical assortment of musings, anecdotes and observations on life and elegance. As she turned 97 in 2019, she signed a modeling contract with the worldwide company IMG.

Iris Barrel was born on Aug. 29, 1921, in Astoria, Queens, the one little one of Samuel Barrel, who owned a glass and mirror enterprise, and his Russian-born spouse, Sadye, who owned a style boutique. Iris studied artwork historical past at New York College and artwork on the College of Wisconsin, labored for Girls’s Put on Every day, apprenticed with the inside designer Elinor Johnson, and opened her personal design agency.

She married Carl Apfel, an promoting government, in 1948. That they had no youngsters. Her husband died in 2015 on the age of 100.

Their Outdated World Weavers had restored curtains, furnishings, draperies and different materials on the White Home for 9 presidents, from Harry Truman to Invoice Clinton.

Ms. Apfel’s flats in New York and Palm Seashore had been filled with furnishings and tchotchkes which may have come from a Luis Buñuel movie: porcelain cats, plush toys, statuary, ornate vases, gilt mirrors, faux fruit, stuffed parrots, work by Velázquez and Jean-Baptiste Greuze, a model on an ostrich.

The style designer Duro Olowu instructed The Guardian in 2010 that Ms. Apfel’s work had a common high quality. “It’s not a pattern,” he stated. “It appeals to a sure form of pleasure in everyone.”