Iris Apfel, eccentric New York fashion icon, subject of exhibitions and Instagram star, died Friday at 102, her official account on the social network announced.
“Iris Barrel Apfel, August 29, 1921 — March 1, 2024,” we can read on the publication accompanied by a photo of her dressed in a long gold patterned dress and large black glasses. She was still active on the network the day before. Iris Apfel, eccentric New York fashion icon, subject of exhibitions and Instagram star, died Friday at 102, her official account on the social network announced.
The self-proclaimed “geriatric starlet” from Queens had recently signed a collection for H&M, following multiple collaborations, including Citroën, Magnum, Happy Socks, MAC. A form of consecration, she also inspired a Barbie doll in her image.
With 2.9 million subscribers on Instagram, the centenarian still attended the presentations of great fashion designers, and paraded with her immense crimson smile in her wheelchair.
“Dare to be different”
Born in 1921 to a Jewish family in Queens, New York, Iris Apfel studied art history. An interior designer, she participated in White House renovations for nine presidents, from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton.
For decades, she has amassed a collection of clothes from the greatest designers of the 20th century, which fill two floors of her Park Avenue apartment. In 2005, the Met Museum in New York devoted a retrospective to this wardrobe. For her famous jewelry, she said she got her supplies from Tiffany’s as well as from the Harlem bazaars.
“One day someone said to me: ‘You’re not pretty and you never will be. But it does not matter. You have something much more important: you have style,” she used to say.
In 2016, she was simultaneously the subject of an exhibition at Bon Marché in Paris, the face of a new advertising campaign from Citroën and an Australian ready-to-wear brand, Blue Illusion.
This fashionista was the subject of a 2014 documentary directed by Albert Maysles, Iris. In 2015, following 67 years of living together, she lost her husband, Carl, a textile industrialist, who died at the age of 100.
A fan of colorful silhouettes, Iris Apfel called on women to abandon the “uniform of black tights or jeans with a sweater, ankle boots and a leather jacket”.
His mantra: “dare to be different”. His secret: never having stopped working. “Try new things. Don’t be fooled by the age and the numbers.”
Iris Apfel had managed to acquire “mastery of the art of living”, summed up musician Lenny Kravitz on Instagram.
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