What Iris Wore: A Style Original
By
Ruth La Ferla
HERVÉ PIERRE BRAILLARD is no fashion evangelist, but the other day Mr. Braillard, the self-effacing designer behind the Carolina Herrera label, was uncustomarily effusive. "Everyone is going to be talking about this," he predicted, this being "Rara Avis: Selections from the Iris Barrel Apfel Collection," the exhibition at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Since opening last month the show, assembled from the wardrobe of Mrs. Apfel, a New York society figure and a founder of a textile firm, has had people chattering with a heat and enthusiasm rare in the fashion world. Mr. Braillard himself was quick to spread the word, showering friends and acquaintances with phone calls and e-mail messages. "To miss this if you are in the fashion business makes no sense," he insisted.
Carla Fendi, Giorgio Armani and Karl Lagerfeld have taken in the exhibition of Mrs. Apfel's personal style, a rare look in a museum at a fashion arbiter, not a designer. Her approach is so inventive and brash that its like has rarely been glimpsed since Diana Vreeland put her exotic stamp on the pages of Vogue.
As the show's name suggests, Mrs. Apfel, who toots around town in signature bangles and owlish spectacles, is an oddball hybrid: a bird of paradise with a magpie eye for sorting and gathering. A mistress of the disjunctive effect, she likes to combine, as she did for the show, a fluffy couture evening coat made of red and green rooster feathers with red suede trousers slashed to the knees; a discreet rose-colored angora twin set found in England in the 1980's with a 19th-century Chinese brocade panel skirt, accented with a strand of jade beads that swing down past the mannequin's knees.
Her cultural Cuisinart approach simultaneously reflects fashion's love affair with mismatched styles and incongruity, and pushes it to new extremes. Minimalism may be fashion's next direction, but Mrs. Apfel's ornate bohemianism may tempt designers to reverse their course.
"This is a visionary show: nothing on this level has been done for years," said Rachel Crespin, a former fashion editor and designer, who is a design consultant for Ralph Lauren. "It will inevitably rub off on the fashion world."
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It has already rubbed off on Ms. Crespin, who acknowledged that the sumptuous fabrics and decorative trims in the exhibition are likely to influence Mr. Lauren's fall 2006 collection. "The market has needed a jolt like this," she said.
Sawing away at a steak salad in the museum patrons' dining room this month, Mrs. Apfel, slim and erect at 84, affected the hearty and slightly bewildered manner of a woman who could not see what the fuss was about. "I've been called a lot of things in my day," she declared, "but I've never been called an inspiration."
Spendthrift comes more readily to mind. "People think that all I do is shop," she confided, but she has worked all her life, first as an interior designer and then, in the 50's, as a founder, with her husband, Carl Apfel, of Old World Weavers, a textile and design company. Their clients included Greta Garbo, Estée Lauder and Marjorie Merriweather Post, who clambered up to the Apfels' second-floor shop wearing sneakers.
Though Mrs. Apfel remains a consultant to the firm, which was sold 13 years ago, she acknowledged that she has been distracted lately. "I've played hooky so long that any day I'll walk in and they'll say, 'You're fired,' " she said, laughing.
Her style places her squarely in the company of a long-vanished breed of socially prominent style-setters of the first half of the 20th century, women whose authority in style matters was absolute. Ignoring the dictates of the runway in favor of a personal aesthetic in those days were maverick spirits like Millicent Rogers, a debutante of the 20's; Nancy Cunard; and Isabel Eberstadt, a society fixture of the 60's. They counted themselves among an influential minority for whom, as Ms. Eberstadt told Marylin Bender for a 1967 book, "The Beautiful People," "looking pretty is not so important as creating a mood."
Like Mrs. Eberstadt, who sallied forth in feathered headdresses and jeweled masks and wore the white boots and architectural dresses of André Courrèges well in advance of her moneyed contemporaries, Mrs. Apfel is something of an artist manquée. "She has a sort of controlled flamboyance," said Lisa Koenigsberg, the director of programs in the arts at the New York University School of Continuing Education, "control" being the operative word. Ms. Koenigsberg has invited Mrs. Apfel to speak next month at her annual fashion symposium, a magnet for the fashion crowd. The Apfel style, she said, is a paradox, both quiet and clamorous, her tailored coats and immaculate cashmeres providing a subtle backdrop against which "the baroque statement stands out."
Quick to identify the relationships among what seems disparate, Mrs. Apfel thinks nothing of mixing a boxy, multicolor Bill Blass jacket from the early 90's with an exotically tinted Hopi dancing skirt and hirsute goatskin boots. In the wrong hands such ethnic get-ups might look costumy, "very Yetta Samovar," as she put it. Her particular high-low spin defies easy classification.
In some ways Mrs. Apfel, who describes her look as "either very baroque or very Zen -- everything in between makes me itch," comes across as a visual rebuke to tamer, more mannered society swans of the moment, who appear in the glossies month after month wearing glad rags lifted wholesale from the runways. "All these American ladies of style to me are too perfect," she said. "There's something uptight about them."
Her own idols, Millicent Rogers and Pauline de Rothschild, who underscored her unconventional beauty by dressing austerely, could never have stomached their blandness. .
Or their chilly formality. Mrs. Apfel, who likes to call herself the world's oldest teenager, is not too grand to wear jeans, her repertory ranging from "the cheapest Levi's to the most extravagant Cavallis," she said.
Harold Koda, the Costume Institute curator, who worked with Mrs. Apfel and Stéphane Houy-Towner to organize the galleries, had high praise for her curatorial eye. "To dress this way, there has to be an educated visual sense," he said. "It requires courage."
Other people might find Mrs. Apfel's idiosyncratic ensembles inspiring enough to emulate, but to pull them off takes discipline, Mr. Koda argued. "I keep thinking, don't attempt this at home."
The breadth and range of her wardrobe prompted Mr. Koda to expand the show, originally envisioned as a discreet display of jewelry and accessories, to one encompassing some 82 ensembles and more than 300 accessories amassed over more than 50 years of travel, ardent flea-marketing, working and socializing.
The installation encompasses Bakelite bangles from the 30's, flea market finds like a plastic charm necklace and a tin handbag in the shape of a terrier, Tibetan cuff bracelets that look as weighty as automotive parts and a tiger-pattern traveling outfit of her own design. This last occupies a place in her wardrobe on roughly equal footing with, say, a bouffant red multicolor floral silk evening dress designed in the mid-80's by Gerard Pipart for Nina Ricci; a triple-tier taffeta ball gown from Lanvin; or a husky coat of Mongolian lamb and squirrel from Fendi, wittily displayed on a mannequin emerging on all fours from an igloo.
The show is an audacious departure for the Met. The museum has exhibited pieces from designer collections, Mr. Koda said, "but one thing we've never done is to show an individual's wardrobe, because that becomes social history."
With a humor as crisp as dry leaves, Mrs. Apfel interposed: "This is no collection. It's a raid on my closet." She claims to be shocked that the exhibition came together at all. "I always thought to show at the Met you had to be dead," she said.
Visitors to the Costume Institute -- New York grande dames, students of art, design and social history, busloads of tourists and chattering children -- seem grateful that is not so. Roaming the galleries last week Kassie McDonald, an assistant designer at a small New York fashion house, was galvanized by Mrs. Apfel's unorthodox eye. "The way she combined yellow gold with different metals and even plastic was definitely an inspiration," said Ms. McDonald, 27. "She is very modern."
Alan Futran, 17, a high school senior, does not know much about fashion, he said, but he knows a free spirit when he sees one. Tearing his eyes from a fuchsia-tinted striped rabbit fur coat mated with rose-color polka-dot pants, he murmured approvingly that the show was "flashy and original" but reserved his highest praise for Mrs. Apfel herself. "She's pretty out there, I'd say."
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 17, 2005, Section G, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: What Iris Wore: A Style Original.
