Iris Apfel, a New York society matron and inside designer who late in life knocked the socks off the straight trend world with a brash bohemian fashion that blended hippie classic and high fashion, discovered treasures in flea markets and reveled in contradictions, died on Friday in her dwelling in Palm Seaside, Fla. She was 102.
Stu Loeser, a spokesman for her property, confirmed her dying.
Calling herself a “geriatric starlet,” Ms. Apfel in her 80s and 90s set tendencies with clamorous, irreverent ensembles: a boxy, multicolored Invoice Blass jacket with tinted Hopi dancing skirt and bushy goatskin boots; a fluffy night coat of purple 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 is perhaps 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, practically all the time, her signature armloads of bangles and owlish spectacles, massive as saucers.
She was tallish and skinny, with a brief crop of silver hair and scarlet gashes on lips and fingernails, a bit outdated girl among the many fashions at Style Week and an genuine Noo Yawk haggler at a store in Harlem or a souk in Tunisia.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 costume like everyone else, you don’t must assume like everyone else,” Ms. Apfel instructed Ruth La Ferla of The New York Occasions 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 Nineteen Fifties, Ms. Apfel designed interiors for personal purchasers like Greta Garbo and Estée Lauder. Together with her husband, Carl Apfel, she based Previous World Weavers, which bought and restored textiles, together with many on the White Home. The Apfels scoured museums and bazaars world wide for textile designs. She additionally added recurrently to her enormous wardrobe collections at her Park Avenue condominium in Manhattan.
The Apfels bought 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 recognized in society and to the style cognoscenti for ignoring the dictates of the runway in favor of her personal artfully clashing kinds.
In 2005, the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, going through 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: Picks From the Iris Apfel Assortment,” assembled 82 ensembles and 300 equipment within the museum’s Costume Institute: Bakelite bangles from the Nineteen 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 mentioned. “It’s a raid on my closet. I all the time thought to indicate on the Met you needed to be useless.”
Harold Koda, the curator who helped arrange the present, mentioned: “To decorate this manner, there needs to be an informed visible sense. It takes braveness. I preserve considering, Don’t try this at dwelling.”
Quickly the present was the speak of the city. Below 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 kids. Carla Fendi, Giorgio Armani and Karl Lagerfeld took it in.
“A uncommon look in a museum at a trend arbiter, not a designer,” The Occasions known as the present, including, “Her method is so ingenious and brash that its like has not often been glimpsed since Diana Vreeland put her unique stamp on the pages of Vogue.”
Virtually in a single day, Ms. Apfel grew to become a world superstar of pop trend — 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 hundreds to her public appearances.
Mobs confirmed up for her bookstore signings after the 2007 publication of “Uncommon Chook of Style: The Irreverent Iris Apfel,” a coffee-table e book 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 Occasions 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 creating the grandest of entrances.”
In 2016, Ms. Apfel was seen in a tv business for the French automobile DS 3, grew to become the face of the Australian model Blue Phantasm, and started a collaboration with the start-up WiseWear. A 12 months later, Mattel created a one-of-a-kind Barbie doll in her picture. It was not on the market.
In 2018, she printed “Iris Apfel: Unintended Icon,” an autobiographical assortment of musings, anecdotes and observations on life and magnificence. 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 trend boutique. Iris studied artwork historical past at New York College and artwork on the College of Wisconsin, labored for Girls’s Put on Day by day, apprenticed with the inside designer Elinor Johnson, and opened her personal design agency.
She married Carl Apfel, an promoting government, in 1948. They’d no kids. Her husband died in 2015 on the age of 100.
Their Previous 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 Seaside had been stuffed with furnishings and tchotchkes that 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 mentioned. “It appeals to a sure type of pleasure in everyone.”
