Born: 29 August 1921, United States
Died: 1 March 2024
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Iris Barrel
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Iris Apfel was known as a textile designer within her field for decades. But it wasn’t until The Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted an exhibition of her wardrobe in 2005—13 years after she retired and well into her 80s—that she achieved broader recognition as an influential tastemaker. Rara Avis (Rare Bird): The Irreverent Iris Apfel was the first time the museum had used an individual’s personal clothing as the basis for a show. As she told The Telegraph in 2011, “I’m very grateful at my stage of the game to have all this happen. It makes me laugh and laugh; it’s ridiculous, because underneath, I’m the same person I’ve always been.” Her fame increased with the 2014 documentary Iris about “the quick-witted, flamboyantly dressed 93-year-old style maven who has had an outsized presence on the New York fashion scene for decades… a singular woman whose enthusiasm for fashion, art and people are her sustenance.” By her 90s, she’d become the subject of several exhibitions and a coffee table book, signed with an international agent as a fashion model, and starred in a campaign for MAC cosmetics. In 2018, she published an autobiography, Iris Apfel: Accidental Icon.
Apfel studied art and art history at New York University and the University of Wisconsin. She married her husband in 1948, and they launched the textile firm Old World Weavers two years later, running it together until they retired in 1992. “Her striking design sense and original style choices created consistent successes in a fickle fashion world. As an accomplished business woman, her choices and design aesthetic flew in the face of culturally approved dictates for women. And not just in one instance or era—throughout her astounding life,” Forbes would later state. Apfel described her textile designs as “classic but over the top.”
Describing herself as a “geriatric starlet” and “the world’s oldest living teenager,” Apfel lived to be 102, having become, in her own words, an accidental icon.