Part 3, My fashion inspriation - Iris Apfel

 

So far, I've noticed my style inspiration has abeen women who we would consider clsssically beautiful. - Marilyn Monroe and Kate Moss are considered some of the most beautiful women of their time. However,  style and classic beauty don't necessarily go hand in hand. You can be the most stylish person in the room and not be classically beautiful. Beauty isn't always about the golden ratio and the 'perfect face'. Beauty comes from knowing yourself, being comfortable in your skin. However, great style is certainly about aesthetics. While 'ugly fashion' is certainly a thing, (think crocs, socks and sandals, geek chic, mum jeans and dad trainers), fashion in general, is about the beautiful and looking good. And style is no different.

Part 3 of my style inspo series is going to look at one woman who might not have Kate Moss's bone structure, or Marilyn Monroe's sexy vulnerability and classic beauty, But Iris Apfel has more style than all the women on my list put together. For me, Iris Apfel's style radiates it's own perfection. One of the main reasons I love Iris's style, is that she loves a good accessory as much as I do. Sure, her clothes are bold and she puts things together in a way I could never imagine doing - she's one of those people who can clash prints perfectly, in that Miu Miu way that I seem to struggle with = but Iris clearly loves her jewellery and her glasses - and as such, is a woman after my own heart. If I could spend a day poking around Iris's jewellery collection, I would be one happy, shiny magpie.  Just don't ask her what her favourite accessory is. When one fashion journalist dared raise the subject, she was rebuffed immediately, "Why do you fashion people always ask that question? I have several accessories, I couldn’t pick just one! It’s like asking me ‘Who is your favourite child?’

In a paean to Iris on her 99th birthday, journalist Kettj Talon wrote: "Mrs Apfel's style is unconventional, eccentric, excessive, bold, layered, coloruful, baroque. Dressing for Iris is a process of jazz improvisation. Following only her rhythm and attitude, Iris is a master at mixing pieces found in flea markets with others of haute couture. Her outfits are a free combination of eras, cultures, made of everything she loves: bracelets, bright colours, bold prints, Balenciaga, Dries Van Noten, Oscar de la Renta, marabou feathers, furs, plastic jewellery, ethnic garments, denim,  Her motto? "Forget the rules, if you like it wear it.""

Iris celebrating her 99th birthday. She is due to celebrate her 100th this month

Iris Apfel turns 100 next month and is considered one of the most stylish women in the world. Unconventional, eccentric, excessive, Iris has subverted every rule, destroying stereotypes and taboos about age, showing that to become an 'It girl' you don't need to be in your twenties, but, above all, that getting old doesn't necessarily mean mortifying yourself and dressing frumpily. Quite the opposite. The only important thing is to stay true to yourself - a mantra Iris repeats over and over.

Whereas most 'It' girls have faded into obscurity well before their first wrinkle (largely because, sadly, the media has little interest in women of a certain age),. but Iris has her own view on the subject, commenting, “If you can’t be pretty, you have to learn to make yourself attractive. I found that all the pretty girls I went to high school with came to middle age as frumps, because they just got by with their pretty faces, so they never developed anything. They never learned how to be interesting. But if you are bereft of certain things, you have to make up for them in certain ways. Don’t you think?”

Iris's style is immediately recognisable. Although a fashion icon, she is no fashion victim. Iris has always dressed in her own style and to her own taste. With her shock of white hair, ginormous black round rimmed glasses and bold lipstick and nails her beauty regime appears as the only constant, because  her outfits take in everything from the baroque to renaissance art, bright bold clashing colours are common and then there's the jewellery I already mentioned. With her more is more attitude, Jewish New Yorker Iris style manages to look perfectly styled even though her outfits are usually utterly extravagant and completely mad. Iris looks like she's rolled naked around every floor in MoMA, clothing herself in every great genre of art from contemporary to ethnic to classical , and then dived headfirst into Aladdins Cave and come up trumps. Her outfits are truly inspirational.

Iris and her hustand, Carl, in 1947

But from the beginning, who is she, and how did the fame start?

Iris worked her life as an Interior Designer with her husband, Carl, the love of her life and partner for over 70 years til the day he died. They set up their own successful textile company and designing for the Kennedy's as well as a contract with the White House that spanned 9 presidencies. She did not become famous til her mid 80s, when when the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art showed her wardrobe in an exhibit called Rara Avid (Rare Bird): The Irreverent Iris Apfel.  Self deprecatingly, she calls herself a "geriatric starlet". But really she is also a world-famous fashion icon, a regular front-row guest at fashion shows. She has over a million followers on Instagram where she shows off her different outfits in her extravagantly styled apartment. - an apartment that's chock-full of European antiques she's collected on her travels, clashing fabrics, eclectic artwork and racks and racks of her extensive clothing and accessory collections. Architectural Digest's peek inside her home is nothing short of fascinating.

In a recent interview, Iris gave her own take on beauty and style, commenting they were all about individuality and confidence:

“Nothing exists in a vacuum, so of course style and beauty are connected. There's all kinds of beauty – savage beauty, sweet beauty, artificial beauty, even sexy beauty. But it’s all about point of view. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder – every culture has its standards of beauty, and those standards change with time. What some tribes consider beautiful we would consider hideous, and vice versa. And when we look back on styles from the past, sometimes we think “ugh, awful,” and at other times we think “how beautiful.” If everybody thought the same thing was beautiful all the time, it would be pretty awful!

“Beauty is largely in your head. When you’re somebody who’s not a natural beauty, but you're attractive, it’s about smoke and mirrors in a way. There are certain things I know look more attractive on me than others, and certain ways that my hair looks better. If you spend a little time on yourself, you usually get results. And confidence is very important. No matter how pretty you are, if you look ill at ease in your own skin, then you're not going to look so beautiful. I think serenity can be a large part of someone’s beauty.

When it comes to clothes, Iris stauncly beleives style has nothing to do with money:

When asked if it is possible to buy style, Iris responded "Style has nothing to do with money. It's a matter of attitude. The most stylish people I ever saw were in Naples right after the Second World War. They were really threadbare but put themselves together with so much dash, like placing a flower in the buttonhole of a tattered suit."

"I like simple, architectural clothes. With accessories, you can make 50 outfits. I learned that from my mother because I was a child of the Depression."

Most importantly Style is not about what you wear, but how you wear it:

“Style is not about wearing expensive clothes. You can have all kinds of money and have no style at all. You can be dressed in the latest couture, shod in ten-thousand-dollar shoes and be baubled to the nines, and look like a Christmas tree. It’s not what you wear but how you wear it.

Iris Apfel immortalised at 96 with her own image Barbie weraing a copy of her green Gucci suit and oversized glasses

“I’m just as happy to wear bangles that cost me three dollars as I am to wear valuable pieces — and I like to mix high and low, putting things together to wear as the spirit moves me. When you try to hard to have style, you look uncomfortable, like you’re wearing a costume, like the clothes are entering the room before you do. If you’re uptight, you won’t be able to carry off even a seemingly perfect outfit. If that’s happening, I say abandon the whole thing. It’s better to be happy than well dressed.”

While I admire Iris' ability to clash patterns and colours, she would be a pretty difficult style inspiration for someone who lives in black - you would think. But Iris does do black. we have witnessed many occasions where the style star chooses black instead. She, of course, has a range of jet-black jewellery to throw on, but when it comes to wearing darker clothes, her outlook revolves around texture, texture and more texture. Think embroidery, Mongolian lambswool, beading, fur, leather and silks.

Similarly, one might consider such a conoisseur of fashion, too high-brow to wear jeans. Not Iris. In fact, Iris counts herself as one of the first women to interpret the humble worker's trouser into her wardrobe.Iris had a lot to say about the garment when talking to Architectural Digest in 2011: "Have you seen the prices? Scandalous. I mean, yes, if they are embroidered or beaded or made special in some divine way, but honestly, jeans are jeans. I live in them most of the time, but I had a helluva time getting a pair of jeans around 1940, when I was at the University of Wisconsin. I thought I'd wear jeans, a turban, and some old earrings. So I went to an Army-Navy store, but you have to remember, back in those days, all the men in Wisconsin were the size of Paul Bunyan. Then the salesman told me, 'young ladies don't wear jeans.' He wouldn't sell me any or have them cut down. So I kept going back to the store, and they kept throwing me out, so to get rid of me, they finally ordered me some boys' jeans. I love men's jeans; they fit me better."

On style today Apfel had this to say. “In New York you can almost tell a person’s zip code by the way they dress. People say they want to look different but they all want to be in a pack… God put you on the earth as an individual, not as a pack-member.”

So who does the World's Greatest Style Icon consider stylish? No-one young today, according to one interview, but she did profess to admire several ladies once. Iris has never followed the rules of fashion and always dressed following only her instinct and personal taste, but, besides her mother, there are three muses that have influenced Apfel's style with their unique and unconventional attitude: Pauline de Rothschild, Millicent Rogers and Elsie de Wolfe aka Lady Mendl, socialite and the first woman interior designer in history.

Speaking on how to develope your own personal style, she says the key is to put in effort. “First of all it’s work. You have to know who you are. You have to know yourself,” she says. “You have to know what you can pull off, what you feel comfortable with, what you can afford; all of that and work accordingly,” adding that doing your research is crucial. “Look at a lot of magazines, shops, other people, hone your eye and decide what you like.”

Ultimately Iris's attitude is to keep your youthful wonder and not take yourself or fashion too seriously:

"When you get older, as I often paraphrase an old family friend, if you have two of anything, chances are one of them is going to hurt when you get up in the morning. But you have to get up and move beyond the pain. If you want to stay young, you have to think young. Having a sense of wonder, a sense of humour, and a sense of curiosity — these are my tonic.

They keep you young, childlike, open to new people and things, ready for another adventure. I never want to be an old fuddy-duddy; I hold the self-proclaimed record for being the World’s Oldest Living Teenager and I intend to keep it that way.”

Iris also maintains a healthy perspective, not one to starve herself into the latest fashions : “I think being happy is much more important. I mean, if you’re plump and you like willowy-looking clothes then…starving yourself is not pleasant. Just forget about those clothes. Clothes are not the most important thing in the world,” Apfel says. “Dressing up should be a joyful, fun experience for yourself… for some people it’s an easy job and for other people it’s a chore. And if you look up-tight and you’re unhappy with it then I think it’s better to look like everybody else than be unhappy.” 

When asked what style mantra she lived by, Iris answered, 

I don’t live by style, I have a lot of other things to live by. I don’t have any mantras, I don’t have any rules, I dress the way I please and I do what I please and I do everything for my good. I don’t intellectualise it or make up rules and regulations.

Spoken like a true style icon. Happy Birthday Iris!!!