“Nothing I ever did I expected to do,” Iris Apfel, the eclectic New York style icon, explains in Iris, a new documentary by Albert Maysles. “It just kind of happened.” At 93, Apfel has become our leading ambassador for the fashion of chance: the idea that good taste isn’t aspirational but realized on the fly, that more can be done with well-layered costume jewelry and a one-of-a-kind poncho than with all the season’s must-have fare. “I like to improvise,” she confesses near the start of the film, which assembles footage from her life in fittingly kaleidoscopic patterns. For Apfel, getting dressed is a creative act—like playing jazz, she says—and the unexplored expanses of the world are a sourcebook to fill her closets. It’s a sartorial safari seen through round, rose-colored glasses, and it looks, most of the time, like wild fun.
Apfel was well into her eighties when she became an It girl; it wasn’t until a 2005 exhibition at the Costume Institute that she became publicly known. Years before that, though, her style sense had earned her a quiet following among the arbiters of taste. Shortly after her marriage to her husband, Carl—“He was cool, he was cuddly, and he cooked Chinese, so I couldn’t do any better,” she said—the couple founded Old World Weavers, an interior-design firm that redecorated the White House under presidents Truman to Clinton. To source the unique art and fabrics for which they were known, they traveled widely. Even since retiring, Apfel continues to make rounds close to home. In Maysles’s film, we watch her haggling for bracelets in Harlem—she only wants the cheap ones, three for twenty dollars—and commuting between New York City and Florida, sometimes taking fifty phone calls a day. We learn how she arranges mannequins in her own image (layered jewelry, pattern contrasts) and sells accessories on the Home Shopping Network. (“Color can raise the dead!”) Most of all, we start to understand the mind behind the brazen taste. Where other style icons are sometimes prescriptive and arch, Apfel finds beauty in individuality, however offbeat. Real fashion isn’t about pleasing the people around you, she says, but about pleasing yourself: “It’s better to be happy than to be well-dressed.”
To herald the opening of Iris this week, Vogue.com spoke with Apfel about taste, her influences, and the challenges of starring in a movie by Albert Maysles, a canonic New York documentarian who died this March, at 88.
Let’s talk about the making of Iris. You’re someone who’s been on camera a lot over the past decade. Was there a difference in Albert’s approach to filming, as compared with what you’re used to?
Albert’s approach is unique in that the subject doesn’t know what Albert is doing. Which is kind of interesting. Everybody thinks that Albert and I were old, old friends, but I only met him at the beginning of the film. We just hit it off. There was great simpatico, and we were very comfortable with each other. They just followed me around to various things—so many things, because we filmed on and off for four years. He had to go off to Europe and travel to get awards. The same with me, and then I broke my hip. Sometimes six or eight months would pass and we didn’t see each other. I had no idea what he was doing. . . . I didn’t see the film until it premiered at Lincoln Center.
What was your response?
I was just kind of in shock. They had me sit in the very front row, because I had to do a Q&A and they didn’t want me running down the steps and falling on my butt. And I’m very, very farsighted, so my head was all the way back and I couldn’t see half of it. I had to see it again at the Hamptons International Film Festival.
Was there anything you were uncomfortable with?
I never did anything I was uncomfortable with. There were a few things that were left out that I wished had been included, but I guess there’s a reason they didn’t put them in.
Such as?
The Costume Institute named a gallery for me. I thought that was kind of important.
When they first approached you about the project—
I said no. They called me up and asked me if I wanted to do a documentary, and I said I wasn’t interested. Then I told people, and they said I was crazy. Linda Fargo called me out and said, You have a nerve! I mean, people would drop dead to have Albert even take a still photograph of them, and you’re turning him down? Who the hell do you think you are? He called me again and invited me to come up to the studio in Harlem. I met the staff and we all fell in love, and I said, “O.K., I’ll do it.” At the time, I thought, who would want to see a documentary about me? I have no ego problems, and I don’t have anything to sell, so, you know. . . .
One of the themes of the documentary is your impatience with banality in fashion, with everybody looking the same. Is that a feeling you’ve always had, or do you think that people have become more the same as you’ve gotten older?
Yes, I think it’s terrible. I think it’s very sad. . . . People are being robbed of their imaginations—and everything else—with this button-pushing culture we have.
So how do you guide young people away from that? In the documentary, we see some of the work you’ve done as a teacher.
At the end of the year, I’m always invited to look at students’ work and give a critique and all of that. I realized that there were a lot of problems. The kids weren’t being taught a lot of important, practical stuff at the schools. When they asked me to help beef up the fashion department at the University of Texas, I thought that the kids should be exposed to the fact that fashion is not just being a red-carpet designer—which they all dream of, stupidly—or being a merchandise man. There’s a big part of the scene under the umbrella of fashion that’s rewarding and interesting. So I put together this program. I expose them to important jobs in licensing, styling, back-of-museum work, and on and on. Once a year, they have a contest at the school, and the winners come to New York. I take them around for a very intensive week. It has just been mind-boggling for them. They just go bananas. And I’ve learned so much. The school subsequently endowed the program in my name, and made me a professor.
Did you yourself find any teachers especially influential on your early interest in fashion and design?
There were several that impressed me very deeply. I had the good fortune to be able to take a course with Margaret Mead. I had a fabulous art course, where it was explained to me that nothing exists in a vacuum, that everything is a result of the period in which it’s done—the economics, the sociology, the politics, all sewn together. That was a very important lesson.
In Iris, we see you packing up a lot of your collection of garments and furniture and jewelry—in a sense, your history—to donate or to archive. Was that a difficult process? Do you find that you miss anything?
Well, it’s not joyful. I love all my things. It’s like getting rid of old friends. But you’ve got to move on. You’ve got to be practical. Sooner or later, you’ve got to get rid of some stuff. I’m not buying any more pieces. I mean, the only thing I buy now is jewelry. And some accessories.
What’s next, then?
Oh, I’ve got so many projects on the fire. The movie is coming out. The kids come from Texas. I’m working on another handbag collection. I have another jewelry collection, too. I’m starting a new book—musings, things that pop into my head, little essays, and one-liners. A lot is going on.
This interview has been edited and condensed.