Iris Apfel

Robert McFadden's record for delivering tribute obituaries for the deceased who have lived passed 80, 90, and even 100 remains intact. Yesterday's print edition of the NYT delivers a six-column full color obit for Iris Apfel, 102, who passed away in Palm Beach, Florida.

This might be the first McFadden obit I've ever seen for a subject who was an eclectically dressed woman who was not a fashion designer, but rather a fashion design unto herself.

McFadden's lede is breathless: "a New York Society matron and interior designer who late in life knocked  the socks off the fashion world with a brash bohemian style that mixed hippie vintage and haute couture, found treasures in flea markets and reveled in contradictions..."

She did this wearing, seemingly all at once: "boxy multicolored Bill Blass jackets with tinted Hopi dancing skirts and hairy goatskin boots; fluffy evening coats of red and green rooster feathers with suede pants slashed to the knees, a rose angora sweater and a19th-century Chinese brocade panel skirt." And those were just some of the clothes. The accessories were another story.

I would have loved to have seen her on a NYC crosstown bus.

She may not have ridden a crosstown bus, but she was seen all over town. Her wardrobe was an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2005. The request from the Met for her clothing collection to be shown surprised her. She thought you had to be dead to be the subject of a show at the Met.

She started as a trained interior designer. She was born as Iris Barrel in Astoria, Queens in 1921 and married Carl Apfel an advertising executive in 1948. He passed away in 2015 at 100. There were no children.

Together Iris and her husband formed a company called Old World Weavers that restored drapes at the White House for nine presidents, from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton.

She sold scarves, bangles and beads of her own design on the Home Shopping Network. And she wore what she sold. Her arms were weighed down with pounds of bracelets the size of "tricycles tires" and necklaces that went down to her knees. It's amazing she was able to stand up.

The Metropolitan show was titled "Rara Avis: Selections from the Iris Apfel Collection." Rara Avis refers to "rare bird," and certainly her owlish eyeglasses were surely made all the better to see you with. She was Flaco the owl long before that ill-fated bird got out of his Central Park Zoo enclosure and flew around Manhattan for only a little more than a year.

I never saw Iris Apfel, and that's no surprise, because we surely traveled in vastly different circles. The only woman I ever saw that came close to being as eye catching was years ago when I saw an elderly woman by the Saks Fifth Avenue elevators on the main floor who was dressed mostly in black with a hat of some kind who had a bearing about her like Bette Davis. She was with some fashionably dressed younger woman who were not wearing all black. They no doubt were headed to a floor I wasn't going to.

Iris Apfel was indeed a rara avis.

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