IRIS APFEL AND CARL
Iris Apfel, born Iris Barrel, is a nonagenarian. Nearly a centenarian. Ninety-eight years alive on this planet, up and taking nourishment. Her signature eyeglasses are twice her size. Think about her. Think she knows something? Anything at all? Or are Iris and her thoughts simply of no moment today? It amazes me that to some, this could even be debatable.
Not enough attention is paid to the forebears of our existence who are able to impart a wealth of knowledge and wisdom to those of us who ask questions and are willing to listen. More often than not, we’re in too much of a hurry or are so immersed in our personal space and social media status that we can barely lift our heads. How appalling. And a bit embarrassing. I don’t want to lay blame here, so suffice to say that I’m a bit old-school. A Baby Boomer. Not a member of the GI Generation or the Mature/Silents. Certainly not of the Gen.Xs, Ys/Millennia or Zs/Boomlets. This ability to listen transcends generation membership and identity. It is the key, unlocking so much. A developing interest burgeons when one listens. It can wither and die when one does not.
Iris Apfel has described herself as a “geriatric starlet.” With a flair for fashion and design, her creative juices have runneth over forever and inimitably stamped a successful long-term career as a textile designer, an interior designer (with the White House included on her client roster) and a producer of her own jewelry and apparel lines. In fact, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York dedicated a showing at the Costume Institute to Apfel’s collection of clothing and jewelry in 2005.
She and her husband Carl whom she met in 1947 spent almost seventy years together. Says she fondly, “Our first date was Columbus Day. Thanksgiving, Carl proposed. Christmas I got blinged. Washington’s birthday we were married.” The rationale? “There was something about her that just got into me,” Carl explained. “It’s always there.” For Iris, “I figured he was cool and he was cuddly, and he cooked Chinese, so I couldn’t do any better.” Perfect. Carl, iconic in his own right passed away a few days shy of his 101st. birthday on August 1, 2015. Iris, naturally devastated, forged on.
Iris Barre was born in Astoria, Queens on August 29, 1921. An only child, she exhibited a passion for style at an early age. “At that time you could ride the whole subway system for a nickel, so each week I would take a different section of New York — Chinatown, Yorkville, Harlem, Greenwich Village. And I really fell in love with the Village.”
Amassing a prodigious collection of unique pieces from around the world began with the purchase of a brooch as a twelve-year-old from a little shop in the basement of “one of those old-fashioned kind of tenement houses that had the fire escapes outside…I thought it was Aladdin’s cave.” The proprietor, a monocled, spat-wearing and natty diminutive gentleman named Mr. Darris, had “never seen a kid be so interested in all this junk before.” A little haggling ensued and Iris bought the piece “for the magnificent sum of 65 cents…I was so thrilled, my God.”
Iris eventually went on to study art history at NYU and attended art school at the University of Wisconsin. She worked as a copy editor at Women’s Wear Daily where her fashion knowledge and bold sense of design continued to serve her well.
In 1950 she and Carl cofounded Old World Weavers, a fabric restoration and replication textile company. Little did they know that the interiors industry would represent a first real stepping stone launching the then twenty-nine-year-old Iris Apfel to cult icon status in the fashion and design communities. Recalled Iris, “We never intended to go into the fabric business. Nothing I ever did I intended to do. Everything just kind of happened.” A completed internship with interior designer Elinor Johnson honed her instincts. She developed an uncanny knack for sourcing just the right materials and fabrics needed to tastefully restore antique pieces. Word spread. Remarked Carl, “She had a very big decorating business. I would go along with her. I’d take my little toolbox, hang the pictures. And I got a kick out of watching her make something beautiful.”
A real gift from God was bestowed upon Iris Apfel. Carl too. Creative collaboration and unconditional love. Their expertise and panache, their duende brought them work at the White House; they undertook projects for several administrations including those of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Clinton. Nine sitting US presidents.
And it wasn’t just Pennsylvania Avenue to which they traveled together. Hardly. “We did exact reproductions of 17th, 18th, 19th and early 20th century fabrics, and I would do my best to get them to be as close as possible to the original,” Iris related. “That’s why we traveled so much, because there is no one or two mills that can do everything. It’s all very specialized.” Turkey, Morocco, and Lebanon twice a year. They would collect items running the gamut: haute couture pieces and knick knacks — chazerai to the untrained eye of many, no doubt — which cost pennies. Iris’ sense of style, fashion and her innate boundless and off-the-charts creativity combined to produce extraordinary unique designs which made her clients’ heads spin. Adoration flooded her way.
Carl was always by her side helping to select pieces with which they could work but it was Iris’ passion for shopping — remember Mr. Darris? — fueling their pursuits. “When you get to know some of the dealers like we did, they’d open up some of the places for us like you’ve never seen before,” Carl said. “They’d open at a certain hour and they’d close at a certain hour [to accommodate the Apfels]. Who do you think was the last one [out]? Iris.” Their decision to have no children made sense to them, partly because of their extensive travel schedule but also because Iris was as committed to the unconventional in her domestic life as she was stylistically. “I don’t believe in a child having a nanny, so it wasn’t what we were going to do, but also having children is like protocol,” she remarked unabashedly. “You’re expected to. And I don’t like to be pigeonholed.”
Heavens no.
“You never know what’s going to happen with this child [Iris] — surprise, surprise,” Carl said of his wife. “It’s not a dull marriage, I can tell you that.” And she had no problem bathing Carl in her fashion sensibility. Iris was still finding unique pieces for her husband to wear well into his nineties. From paisley orange pants matching the lining of one of her jackets to a red baseball cap adorned with spiked gold studs to the same classic tortoise-shell glasses — albeit slightly smaller — which became a trademark of hers. Carl’s wardrobe would pop too, but he retained a more stylish, traditional sense as well, his elan. His eclat. After all, deferential as he may have been, he was still Carl.
He was “a very generous man, and a very funny man. He had a great, dry sense of humor and he was very kind to everybody,” said Iris, describing her husband of parts of eight decades. Added jewelry designer Alexis Bittar, a close friend of the couple, “He was one of the most genteel men I’ve ever met…[a] surrogate parent. I’ve never met a sweeter, more loving couple in my life than Carl and Iris. I was so eager to spend time with them to learn how they navigated their relationship.”
Another close friend, designer Duro Olowu agreed. “Carl was a wonderful man for many reasons: charming, caring and funny. A real gentleman with an inspiring and creative mind as well as exquisite taste and an impressive c.v. [abbreviation for ‘curriculum vitae,’ a latin term meaning course of life]. But most of all his dedication to Iris is an example to us all of true and unconditional love and mutual respect.”
Part of Carl’s allure was related to the content of his character and his high self-esteem, never shown but always felt deeply. After Rara Avis: Selections from the Iris Apfel Collection, the smashingly successful MMA Costume Institute exhibition celebrating the eccentric styles, whims and fancies of Iris — a life-altering event for her — she immediately became a public figure. Press requests and gold-plated invitations of all kinds inundated her. She inked collaboration deals with MAC Cosmetics and the Home Shopping Network. Carl was proud as a peacock of Iris and not the least bit begrudging, covetous or resentful. And this was not because he knew where his bread was buttered. Rather, he accepted her successes as her own although he was a partner in them and was overjoyed because of his love for Iris. She had become an international style icon and the picture of individuality but Carl had his own schtick — being Carl. No insecurities. Sense of humor. And among friends he exhibited his natural being.
“He was sharp as a tack, and he always looked like a dude,” Iris observed lovingly. While running Old World Weavers he often had patterned upholsteries tastefully made into trousers and in an understated way. No clownishness here. Iris recalled, “Somebody would say to him, “Oh, what beautiful trousers, where did you get those?’ And he would say, “I just shot my couch.’”
Bittar in a nutshell put it thusly: “He knows how to have fun with life. He understands the seriousness of everything, but he had come to the conclusion that it’s better to be lighthearted in your perspective of life than get heavy.”
Kudos to Carl.
“Carl and I, from the time we married, we did everything together. We worked together, we traveled together, we lived together — until just recently, I never went anywhere without him.” And Carl never went anywhere without the large, gold Egyptian ring inscribed with the phrase, “Where Is The House of Thy Father?” which Iris literally bought off the finger of an antiquarian in Dublin in the 1950s. When it wasn’t for sale. Apparently her bargaining skills — not taking ‘no’ for an answer — proved too much for the poor gentleman. Carl put on the ring and couldn’t remove it so he wore it for decades. The ring became a symbol of their exciting lives with one another. Two days before he died, the ring finally fell off. And one of the great loving marriages and joined-at-the-hip relationships of all-time was over.
Iris is Iris, her fashion fever still white-hot. “I always like to do things as if I’m playing jazz; try this, try that. With me, it’s not intellectual. It’s all gut…It’s totally, totally the involvement and the process. It’s the process I like much better…People interview me and they keep asking if I have any rules. And I say, I don’t have any rules because I would only be breaking them, so it’s a waste of time.”
No time to waste for Iris Apfel. Now. Then. Or ever.
Consistent as the day is long and an eccentric for the ages, a featured personality in the 2017 HBO documentary If You’re Not In the Obit, Eat Breakfast, how could it possibly play out any differently?
