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 style world with a brash bohemian type that combined hippie classic and high fashion, discovered treasures in flea markets and reveled in contradictions, died on Friday in her house in Palm Seaside, 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 traits 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 likely to 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 all the time, 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, a little bit previous woman among the many fashions at Trend Week and an genuine Noo Yawk haggler at a store in Harlem or a souk in Tunisia. Many referred to 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.

“When you don’t dress like everybody else, you don’t have to think like everybody else,” Ms. Apfel advised 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 Purchasing Community.

For many years beginning within the 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 offered and restored textiles, together with many on the White Home. The Apfels scoured museums and bazaars all over the world for textile designs. She additionally added usually to her big wardrobe collections at her Park Avenue condo 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 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, dealing with the cancellation of an exhibition and on the lookout 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: Selections From the Iris Apfel Collection,” assembled 82 ensembles and 300 accessories 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.

“This is no collection,” Ms. Apfel stated. “It’s a raid on my closet. I always thought to show at the Met you had to be dead.”

Harold Koda, the curator who helped set up the present, stated: “To dress this way, there has to be an educated visual sense. It takes courage. I keep thinking, Don’t attempt this at home.”

Quickly the present was the discuss of the city. Beneath 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 lessons of chattering kids. Carla Fendi, Giorgio Armani and Karl Lagerfeld took it in.

“A rare look in a museum at a fashion arbiter, not a designer,” The Instances referred to as the present, including, “Her approach is so inventive and brash that its like has rarely been glimpsed since Diana Vreeland put her exotic stamp on the pages of Vogue.”

Nearly in a single day, Ms. Apfel grew to become a world superstar 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 hundreds to her public appearances.

Mobs confirmed up for her bookstore signings after the 2007 publication of “Rare Bird of Fashion: 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 Pageant in 2014, and in 2015 it was seen by enthusiastic film audiences in America and Britain. The film critic Manohla Dargis of The Instances called it an “insistent rejection of monocultural conformity” and “a delightful eye-opener about life, love, statement eyeglasses, bracelets the size of tricycle tires and the art of making the grandest of entrances.”

In 2016, Ms. Apfel was seen in a tv industrial for the French automobile DS 3, grew to become the face of the Australian model Blue Phantasm, and commenced 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 printed “Iris Apfel: Accidental 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 baby 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 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 residences in New York and Palm Seaside have been stuffed with furnishings and tchotchkes which may have come from a Luis Buñuel movie: porcelain cats, plush toys, statuary, ornate vases, gilt mirrors, pretend fruit, stuffed parrots, work by Velázquez and Jean-Baptiste Greuze, a model on an ostrich.

The style designer Duro Olowu advised The Guardian in 2010 that Ms. Apfel’s work had a common high quality. “It’s not a trend,” he stated. “It appeals to a certain kind of joy in everybody.”