American designer Iris Apfel dies at 102
By Wilson Adekumola
American centenarian designer and fashion icon, Iris Apfel, has died at the age of 102 years
Her death was announced to her almost three million followers on Instagram, with a picture of Apfel sporting her renowned oversized round glasses.
Afpel from the New York borough of Queens was identified by her oversized owlish glasses.
During her career, Apfel founded international textile manufacturing company Old World Weavers in 1950 alongside her husband Carl, who died in 2015 aged 100
The self-described “geriatric starlet,” best known as a textile designer and fashion icon, reached peak fame only in her 80s and 90s.
Iris Apfel was aged 97 when she signed a modelling contract with global agency IMG Models, who also represent Gigi Hadid and Karlie Kloss.
US designer Tommy Hilfiger was among those to pay tribute as he praised Apfel as an “innovator and leader” in the world of textiles and style, who “will go down in history”.
“Iris Apfel has become a world-famous fashion icon because of her incredible talent not only as an artist, but as an influencer,” he said.
“She has had an amazing effect on so many people with her huge heart and magic touch with everyone she meets.”
US singer Lenny Kravitz and Ted Lasso actress Hannah Waddingham also paid tribute.
A flamboyant interior designer, she was a fixture on front rows of Paris fashion shows for more than half a century.
Her cropped white hair, massive glasses, bright lipstick and large-bead necklaces earned her kooky distinction among New York’s glitterati.
Apfel filled two floors of her Park Avenue apartment with work by the great designers of the 20th century, amassed over her multiple decades of life.
New York’s Metropolitan Museum staged the first major retrospective of her wardrobe in 2005, with Apfel admitting she was as likely to pick up interesting jewelry in a Harlem junk shop as in Tiffany’s.
Never one to shy away from color or unconventional silhouettes, Apfel urged young women at one gathering to abandon the modern “uniform of black tights or jeans with a sweater, boots and a leather bomber jacket.”
Instead she told them to “dare to be different. Be yourselves, be individual.
“If you wear something and it doesn’t work, don’t worry,” she quipped, “the style police are not going to arrest you.”
