Iris Apfel died exactly 102.5 years old – the oldest model in the world will be missing

Coco Chanel once said that before you leave the house, you should look in the mirror and take something off or take it off. A scarf, a necklace, gloves, all the accessories you decorated yourself with. Because? Simply style. Exemption. Simplicity. Iris Apfel was against it all her life. Enough was never enough, she was always in favor of more. Even more colorful. “Colors can bring the dead back to life!” was one of her jokes and “more is more, less is boring.”

She couldn’t celebrate birthdays enough either. At least after her hundredth birthday. She celebrated her birthday every six months. Because anyone can be last. She turned one hundred and two and a half years old on February 29, 2024. She died the next day at her home in Palm Beach, Florida.

She was the oldest model in the world. But it was a career she started late: at the age of 97 she got a real modeling contract. In her first career she was one of the most important textile entrepreneurs in the US. She and her husband Carl had re-wallpapered the White House nine times with their company Old World Weavers, supplying furniture and curtain fabrics; their specialty was the reconstruction of old fabrics from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

They were jointly responsible for the establishment of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Clinton. Everyone was easy, except the Kennedys; First Lady Jackie was too colorful with her love for French design. An accusation that you can hardly imagine coming from Iris Apple. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Jackie Kennedy liked to wear Chanel.

Iris Apple was born in 1921 as Iris Barrell on a farm in the New York borough of Queens (then very rural). Her parents both worked, her father had a glass and mirror shop, her mother a fashion boutique, there was hardly any money, Iris spent her childhood in the shadow of the economic crisis and she looked for clothes in second-hand stores. She negotiated in Manhattan at an early age. as a ten-year-old, she was merciless with the salespeople, and everyone in her family could sew, paint and glue things together.

It was an early course in sustainability, which was important to her until the end. She bought what she liked, vintage, at the market, from the store or from a designer – “I have a black belt in shopping,” she once said. – and if yes. If something turned out to be a bad purchase, the fabric was reworked into pillowcases and other decorative items. She kept many things for decades, and she cherished and wore her wedding shoes for the rest of her life. By the way, her wedding dress was not white, but pink; she wanted to be able to wear it again later.

Carl also grew old, he was 100 when he died in 2015. The two were happily together for 67 years, retiring in 1992 with a somewhat eventful retirement. Of course, they had become wealthy together and had an apartment on Park Avenue in New York. At the age of 100, Carl still called Iris “my child bride,” and Iris called Carl “my little kitten.” She described her fascination with him in 1948: “I thought to myself: he’s cool, he’s cuddly and he cooks Chinese, nothing better could have happened to me.”

She had studied art, she had worked at a fashion magazine, she had traveled the world with Carl and decorated countless apartments, houses and villas – she had the perfect eye and he always had a toolbox with him so he could take pictures of her clients could also hang it wherever Iris wanted.

And then everything became completely different again. In 2005, a costume exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York was canceled. The curator asked Iris Apfel if she would please exhibit a fraction of her wardrobe and jewelry from decades. She agreed, and the exhibition and the woman behind it became a hit. And not (only) among the elderly, but especially among young people.

It was the time when fashion blogs and street photography became big and originality suddenly became as important as tailor-made beauty. And there was no more original fashion icon than Iris Apfel, the woman who had never considered herself beautiful all her life, but was not bothered by it: style came before beauty, that was her credo and she was right.

Iris Apfel turned herself into a meta fashion show because she not only dressed, her outfits consisted of multi-layered sculptures made of feathers, fur, tulle, patterns and lots of jewelry, kilos of chains and bracelets – and especially her big black glasses and the short white hair , both of which also featured in the Barbie doll designed after her.

In all this, what she loved most was the process, not the result, the selection and assembly of fashionable possibilities and impossibilities, the countless crossing of boundaries, the freestyle of a free spirit; she called this her way of playing jazz.

As social media grew, so did Iris Apfel’s global presence, she was incredibly Instagrammable and having fun with it, the platforms gave her even more opportunities for fashion experimentation and photoshoots, she was completely in her paradise, and that audience loved it therefore from .

In 2019, she signed with the important modeling agency IMG. Older women were seen as increasingly popular ‘new’ faces for campaigns and on the catwalks; Helen Mirren, Andy McDowell, Marianne Faithful and Jane Fonda celebrated their ages in a carefree way, which was refreshing, especially for younger women, there was life beyond 50, 60 and 70 – with Iris Apfel even over 90.

Watching her was a joy. And if there was ever anyone who made you want fashion, and even more fashion, and exorbitantly playful individuality, if anyone gave you the courage to embrace fashion, it was her.