http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/fashion/iris-apfel-90-stylish-and-on-hsn-up-close.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all%3Fsrc%3Dtp&smid=fb-share
HER spectacles, as round as soup tureens, lend Iris Apfel a startled look. If she seems surprised, she has good reason. Mrs. Apfel, the subject of a string of museum exhibitions, a coffee table book and even a fashion advertising campaign, has long been a magnet to aficionados, those devotees of fashion who dote on her style — a more-is-more mix of haute couture and hippie trimmings that appears at a glance to have been blended in a Cuisinart.
But now, at 90, she seems baffled, and clearly tickled, to find herself on the cusp of pop stardom, an unlikely celebrity whose fame has been constructed almost entirely around her look. “I’m a geriatric starlet, my dear, don’t you know,” she said the other day. Relaxing in her Park Avenue apartment, a visual feast of cabbage rose patterns, paisleys and brocades, she added, “All of a sudden, I’m hot; I’m cool; I have a ‘fan base.’ ”
Straight people, gay people, students of art and social history, tourists and chattering adolescents, “even little kids,” she noted, gravitate to her lectures, blog about her and send her mash notes. And come September, Mrs. Apfel, wearing her signature owl-shaped frames and festooned in faux amber, will exert her exotic fascination on Middle America, peddling bangles, scarves and beads of her own design on the Home Shopping Network.
Mrs. Apfel’s willfully disjunctive look, and the tart wit behind it, will be the subject of a movie as well, a documentary by Albert Maysles, whose film “The Beales of Grey Gardens” turned the reclusive Edie Beale into a household name. Mrs. Apfel’s charisma, a blend of passion, energy and determination, is compelling to Bradley Kaplan, the president of products at Maysles Films. “She’s wonderfully strong-willed, opinionated and single-minded,” Mr. Kaplan said. “She’s not a waffler.”
Her glasses, he added, “have in effect become a metaphor for her eyes, and through them we’ve found another way of looking at our own world.” Mrs. Apfel has an excess as well of what contemporary audiences seem to crave: originality, a soaring free spirit — and the cunning to turn her brand of eccentricity into a saleable commodity.
She expects to have a little help, of course. “I never thought that in my dotage,” she said, in a tone as dry as rice paper, “that I’d have to find an entertainment lawyer.”
She requires no such guidance in matters closer to her heart. Mrs. Apfel is the discerning curator of her own wardrobe. Sorted and stowed in a vast nearby warehouse, that wardrobe incorporates pieces commemorating high points in her life. “She’s a great storyteller,” said Mindy Grossman, the chief executive of HSN. “Every single thing she wears, she remembers a story behind it.”
Some items are mementos from her travels. The dress she has on above, for example, acquired during a shopping trip to China, was inspired, Mrs. Apfel said, by a traditional design of the Miao villagers. She didn’t like the hood, she recalled, so she promptly sheared if off. “That changed the entire look of the dress,” she said with satisfaction.
Of her glasses, she added, “They are standard equipment; they come with me.”
Her designs, including a scarf printed with images of those frames and others inspired by her personal treasures, will be sold on HSN.
Mrs. Apfel’s star turn on the network, to be broadcast on Sept. 23, will not be her first time in front of a camera. In 2007, Bruce Weber invited her to pose for Italian Vogue. “I thought at the time, When will the likes of me ever get a chance to be photographed by the likes of Bruce Weber?” Mrs. Apfel recalled. “If I have to kill myself, I’ll do that shoot.”
Her wardrobe was lavishly documented by the photographer Eric Boman in “Rare Bird of Fashion: The Irreverent Iris Apfel,” (Thames & Hudson, 2007). She is a fixture of the society columns. Swathed in longhair fur, she was the improbable star of a 2008 Coach advertising campaign. And now she will join a string of fashion divas — outsize characters like Loulou de la Falaise Klossowski and Patricia Field, who have charmed mainstream audiences on shopping TV.
“When you’re with Iris, you don’t even think of the concept of age,” Ms. Grossman said. Nevertheless, decades of creating interiors and presiding with her husband, Carl Apfel, over Old World Weavers, a textile and design company, have conferred on Mrs. Apfel the weight of authority. “I’m not a designer,” she said. “But I’m a good stylist. I know what to pick.”
IT requires a disciplined eye to pull off her style — an artful clash of furs, couture cashmeres and zingy tribal effects that once prompted The New York Times art critic Roberta Smith to write, “Before multiculturalism was a word, Mrs. Apfel was wearing it.”
Harold Koda, the curator of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who organized Mrs. Apfel’s first museum exhibition in 2006, noted at the time: “To dress this way, there has to be an educated visual sense. I keep thinking, ‘Don’t try this at home.’ ”
Still, her fans may be tempted. When Ms. Grossman met with her for lunch not long ago, “Iris was wearing bangles from her wrist to her elbows,” she recalled. Captivated, the next day Ms. Grossman stacked bangles all the way up both arms, affecting, she said, “my own bohemian style for the day.”
Mrs. Apfel’s look is expected to have a similar pull on viewers. Her public appearances and book signings have drawn followers by the thousands, and turned the comically self-effacing Mrs. Apfel into a heroine of sorts. Straight men, she said, are particularly drawn to her. “They are so much more romantic than women,” she said, and seem to share her conviction that “there is not enough glamour in the world.”
Women view her as a role model: “A lot of them have told me, ‘Now that I’ve met you, I feel so liberated.’ ” Secret eccentrics, they have learned, Mrs. Apfel maintained, “that when you don’t dress like everybody else, you don’t have to think like everybody else.”
Let it be known: I have mixed feeling about this book. I have also recently become far more stingy with my star allotment on Goodreads.com and that fact indirectly affects this review.
