By Norma Davidoff
She’s been called a creative force, a fashion icon,
a woman with “an incredible eye”, and a design
iconoclast. This is Iris Barrel Apfel, interior designer
and textile creator, who has become even more celebrated
as a woman with remarkable offbeat taste in clothing and
accessories.
Outstandingly successful in the fabric business, Iris actually
started out in fashion as a Vogue Prix de Paris winner.
That led to one of her earliest jobs, at Women’s
Wear Daily. People liked her off-center approach,
and she naturally gravitated into the world of interior design
and decorating. Mrs. Apfel and her husband Carl founded their
textile firm, Old World Weavers in 1952. They have
been notable as producers of high-end fabrics, catering to
the elite with Iris’ designs.
She and Carl went abroad
to find those designs and then the fabricators, asking them
to use their original looms. They got the fabrics produced,
Carl being the company’s very first salesman. Their business
developed without a master plan. |
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“Everything with
me just happens and grows. I couldn’t do anything
but go high end. Beautiful things that have to be crafted
cannot be made inexpensively. I’m not the sort of personality
that wants to do mass market and cut somebody’s throat for
pennies. We don’t work like that.” Her
husband shared her view, and they nurtured the business together.
They started on a shoestring in a walkup building on East 57th
Street in New York City. “We were on the third floor,
but they were double floors with high ceilings and it was a hike
to get up there. Despite that we had all what I always call
the ‘W ladies’ [ readers of W magazine]. They
all found out about us, and we did custom when we first began. We
couldn’t afford any stock.” Iris recreated patterns
that she hunted down in old books, museums, second-hand shops and
flea markets, much in the same way she finds most of her clothing. Iris
knew her market. “At the beginning, for our things,
we had a limited audience but it was a very loyal and devoted clientele.” Notables
like Estee Lauder, Marjorie Merriweather Post, Jacqueline Onassis
and Greta Garbo all made their way to Old World Weavers.
The Apfel’s work, exact reproductions of antique period
fabrics on the original looms, was so exquisite that the White
House came calling. Old World produced fabrics for the furniture,
walls, and draperies of that one-hundred-room mansion through nine
presidential administrations.
Old World Weavers became such an attractive enterprise that the
prestigious Stark Carpet Company bought it close to 15 years ago. “I
could have sold my business twenty times. Such a wide array of
people were clamoring, and I never wanted to sell it.” But
then Stark Carpets gave them an offer they couldn’t refuse. “It
was an interesting deal, and then after that we were just [kept]
on as working hands,” consulting to Stark who has gone more
mainstream with Old World Weavers.
“We feel like doting grandparents…seeing the
company prosper and grow. It’s a whole different business,” she
notes. Over the past fifteen years Stark has added many more
popular-priced fabrics to the Old World Weavers line. “I
like to try and see that they still keep part of the Old World
stuff because there is a market for that. It’s not
huge, but it should be kept alive. And I try to see that
they do that.”
One example of the exquisitely expensive Old World fabrics is
a heavy upholstery fabric in a tiger pattern in silk woven on a
linen background. It was made on 18th century looms and is
21 inches wide. Today it retails for about $2,000 a yard. “We
have since knocked ourselves off, done a machine version which
doubles the width and at a fraction of the price. It’s
still several hundred dollars a yard.”
Iris used some of this extraordinary fabric to create a coat with
matching bag and boots. The public got a chance to see this
one-of-a-kind outfit along with many of her other dresses and accessories
last year at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York. This was the first time the Institute devoted
an exhibit to the clothing of someone still living. The exhibit, Rara
Avis, drew enthusiastic crowds to see 82 ensembles and over
300 accessories, a mix of Balenciaga and other great designers
with flea-market finds and dresses from shops like Loehmann’s,
the original and foremost discount designer clothing store.
The exhibit was such a success that a new version, entitled Rare
Bird of Fashion: The Irreverent Iris Apfel recently
opened at the Norton Gallery in West Palm Beach, Florida. It
will be on view through May 27, 2007.
All the white mannequins in the show are modeled after Iris, right
down to her giant black owlish spectacles, the same ones seen in
the society columns when Iris and Carl attend functions in New
York City or Florida. “I thought if I better wear glasses,
I better wear glasses. Somebody asked me why. ‘The
bigger to see you.’ I never thought about it, but then
people said they were my trademark…that, and I always wear
pairs of bracelets.”
As they say nothing succeeds like excess. Iris is masterful
at that. She owns a couture evening coat made of multi-colored
rooster feathers which she wears with red suede trousers. A
simple rose-colored sweater set bought in the 1980’s is combined
with a 19th-century Chinese embroidered wedding skirt. A
single strand of jade, known as a Mandarin necklace, swings down
past the the knees on that “Iris mannequin”. She
mixes a boxy, multicolor Bill Blass jacket, circa 1990 with a tinted
Hopi Indian dancing skirt with ever so hairy goatskin boots. One
splendid outfit is a triple-tiered Lanvin ball gown worn with large
quantities of chunky Tibetan jewelry.
Iris’ look has been described as “controlled flamboyance” by
Lisa Koenigsberg, President of Initiatives in Art and Culture. She
notes that the Apfel style is a paradox; her tailored coats and
immaculate cashmere provide a backdrop against which “the
baroque statement stands out.” Harold Koda, the Costume
Institute curator, who worked with Iris and Stephane Houy-Towner
to organize the first exhibit says, “To dress this way, there
has to be an educated visual sense. It requires courage.”
Iris’ accessories carry the day. There are plastic
bracelets from the 30’s, a tin handbag shaped like a terrier,
and heavy Tibetan cuff bracelets. Ethnic jewelry pieces from all
over the world, sometimes as many as six bracelets to an arm, are
on the mannequins. “Whenever I see something I like
I buy it and put it away. I don’t care about provenance. If
I like it and the price is right I buy it because I don’t
buy it for resale. If it doesn’t go with anything I
put it away until it does.”
At heart a hunter-gatherer, Mrs. Apfel says she is as happy to
shop in a store like H & M as at a couturier house in Paris. And
she has frequented both. She likes to browse through racks and
find what appeals to her. “I don’t like
to be waited on and have salespeople say, ‘Oh you must have
this.’ Or say ‘Oh darling this is you.’ “How
the hell do they know who I am?”
What about women in business? How should they dress? Iris’ answer: “I
can’t say. My style is my style. And my style, that
I have evolved over many years works for me. But it is not
going to work if you’re short and fat or a certain body type
or if you have a certain personality. I mean there are some people
who look divine totally understated, and if they put on a couple
of pieces of jewelry, they look overdone.” As Harold
Kota, the curator of the exhibit put it, “You better tell
everybody, ‘Don’t try this at home.’ - - You
gotta know what you’re doing.”
 A book, Rare Bird of Fashion: The Irreverent Iris Apfel, based
on the exhibits, has just been published. Full of color photos
of Iris’ clothing by Eric Bowman, the book’s autobiographical
text was written by Iris with an introduction by Harold Koda of
the Met. In it, she says, “As far as shopping’s
concerned, I’m a hopeless romantic. I buy things because
I fall in love with them. I never buy anything because it’s
valuable.”
She is an inveterate collector who loves antiques because they
have “soul,” as she puts it. Her passion for antique
fabrics led to an exhibit of her collection of Chinese costumes
and textiles at several museums. The book Dragon Threads:
Court Costumes of the Celestial Kingdom: Chinese Textiles from
the Iris Barrl Apfel and Attata Foundation Collections, published
15 years ago and still available, is based on that exhibition.
With a lifetime of accomplishments, at age 85, Iris is not just
relaxing on one of her graceful French chaises. She put together
the exhibit at the Norton and has been busy signing autographs
for her new book, getting as many as 45 phone calls in one day
from well wishers. She remains an authority on antique fabrics
and, of course, still consults to Stark.
“It’s not easy. I mean I had to work very hard at it. It
didn’t just happen. Lots of people want all these things, but they
don’t want to put up or give up or work for them. You know. Everything
has a price. There’s no free lunch, and the day you learn that
you grow up.”
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