Lego Queen

Iris Apfel is a G. That's right: I'm talking about the 90 year old globe-trotting-sherpa-wearing- turquoise-clad-parrot who both embodies and dismantles all that is style and fashion itself. Let me explain.

Iris Apfel was born in Queens in 1921, the granddaughter of a master Russian tailor, and daughter of Samuel and Sadye Barrel. Iris's father worked in the mirror and glass business while her mother owned a small boutique. Admittedly, Iris emerged from the womb to an artistic brood but her fashion sensibility seems God-given. As she recounts it, her first stylistic inspiration occurred at age eight. Sadye had arranged for a formal portrait and Iris was in charge of herself. She and her nanny constructed a gown out of cheese cloth, inspired by Isadora Duncan, thus setting the wheels of improvisation in motion.

As an adult, Iris studied art history at NYU and attended art school at the University of Wisconsin before taking up with Women's Wear Daily, interior designer Elinor Johnson, and illustrator Robert Goodman. Iris developed into her own designer during the Depression. She had a knack for chic ingenuity and maintained affordability even as her clients increased in wealth.

Iris met beau, Carl Apfel, on holiday. It wasn't love at first sight: he declared that she'd be beautiful if only she would have her nose fixed. She scoffed, kissed him, and they've been married happily for 63 years.

Together, the duo started a textile company called Old World Weavers. Due to the nature of her business, Iris and Carl traveled the world, collecting beads, bracelets, silks, and cloth embroidered with mysterious hieroglyphics. Iris and Carl amassed a fortune, with the credibility to restore fabrics at the White House and the luxury of an Upper East Side apartment. Iris remained humble, preferring street style to that of the catwalk. Her friend, designer Duro Olowu, said it best: "Iris is more 'street' than anyone I know...You think of the great dressers – Gloria Guinness or Bab Paley – and there's a certain sense of sadness and sacrifice to them. It's immaculate but cold. Iris dresses how we'd all dress if we had the eye. Fashion is like a big box of Lego to her."

Iris is a child in a toy store where clothes are concerned. She calls herself a “geriatric starlet,” favoring oversize glasses (“the bigger to see you!”), tangles of exotic bracelets, feathers, lace, leather, and otherworldly accessories. Apfel is a maximalist with the opulence of Cleopatra and the pocket of Oliver Twist. Sure, she occupies a gorgeous apartment filled with Velasquez paintings and leopard furniture but she's fiscally conservative. She claims she's never spent more than $15 on a pair of jeans and her signature is her rarefied thrift. She attended dinner at the White House in a monk's robe (the heat was off! she claimed) and gleefully interchanges gypsy capes for Balenciaga cropped pants.

It seems that Apfel's sartorial spontaneity originates in her insistence upon singularity: “if you can't be pretty, you have to learn to make yourself attractive. I found that all the pretty girls I went to high school with came to middle age as frumps, because they just got by with their pretty faces, so they never developed anything. They never learned how to be interesting. But if you are bereft of certain things, you have to make up for them in certain ways. Don't you think?"

With retrospectives at the Met, Peabody Essex Museum, and a recent book entitled Rare Bird of Fashion: Irreverent Iris Apfel, Miss Apfel is commanding Chanel showrooms and African street vendors alike. There's no better time to be yourself. A round of applause for this kooky beauty queen, the rarest bird of all and a sartorial spectacular.

Lady Talk

"what i probably changed deeply was making ugly cool." -miuccia prada

African Girl

There's an adventure inside of me an indoctrinated yearning for asiatic waters and bioluminescence and the taste of candy with eyes closed african chiffon and the patina of his forehead; piping peppermint tea, the charred embers of a mermaid's hair, the promise of smoke on a saturday eve

Documentary

"Oui, it's an animal," he says, "this river"
"oh, quel chapeaux-"
The long-haired beauty skips the plank
Breaking fruit with calabashes
It's splendiferous-
Canoeing down a 2D river

Frida Begins Smoking

On lonely Mondays, Frida smokes cigarettes.
She adds dusty blossoms to her hair of rose and fuchsia,
And dances in the twilight to forgotten guitars,
Her mouth busy with tequila and rumblings of portraiture,
The hours turn orange, plentiful, a crate of clementines.

Show Time

Angels blow hard into tubas during commercial break
The sky glows clean with peppermint soap and prophecies

Quickie

Poem:

I'm giving up candy for Lent.
Today I ate a chocolate turtle.
I hope Jesus forgives me.

PROJECTS:

rooftop camping, cook italian mafia feast, break into swimming pool somewhere, find a deep fryer/ other weirdo appliances at thrift store, build shelter out of bubbles, find spotted dog and train it into ferocious killer, elope to mehico with only $5 and and banjo, make milkshakes (godiva white chocolate liquer and vanilla ice cream), 3 weeks in bed with no TV, kielbasa, skydiving.

"so we burst into colors and carousels"

O Youth and Beauty

Téa Obreht is the new darling of the literary scene and I want to knife her in the chest. She's sinfully young to have published her first novel at 26 years of age, and lauded daily for her maturity, grace, and superlative new book. Téa just published The Tiger's Wife, and the advance praise is nothing short of retardedly amazing: “[a] spectacular debut novel…[Téa] Obreht spins a tale of such marvel and magic in a literary voice so enchanting that the mesmerizing reader wants her never to stop…Obreht will make headlines as one of the most exciting new writers of her generations, a young artist with the maturity and grace that comes of knowing where one is from, and of honoring those who came before." – Entertainment Weekly, Grade: A.

Publishing a novel is one thing, and to be fresh as a daisy is impressive to boot. I'm just jealous as all hell.

At 22 years of age, I fear I'm over the hill. Let's examine the facts. Our nation's current icons are Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, Lady Gaga, Demi Lovato, and Taylor Swift. Justin Bieber was born in 1994 (gasp! babies were made that recently?) yet he's gone platinum and back for his second album My World. Bieber won Artist of the Year, Favorite Pop/ Rock Male Artist, and Best New Artist. Bieber is killing it—he's now instilling prepubescent lust in the private bits of young girls everywhere with his memoir, yes memoir, entitled Never Say Never. And let's not forget that he posed with Kim Kardashian in the Bahamas in an infamous Vanity Fair spread.

Bieber is in good company. His alleged girlfriend, Demi Lovato, at a tender 19 years of age has partnered with Disney and been to rehab, while cohort Miley Cyrus rides stripper poles, draped in the American flag as she reaps in national accolades and buckets of cash.

The point is that the game is changing. The frontier has expanded, and the cowboys and cowgirls, riding high on horses and frenzied with ambition and reckless thirst for power and fame, can now roam free into the scalding sunset. There are no rules. The wild, youthful, and beautiful are welcome to enter the scene, never too inexperienced. The oldest Jonah bro is 23, Miley Cyrus is 19, and Taylor Swift is 20, yet these young flowers form a heady garland, encircling newspapers, tabloids, and billboards on the regular.

Thanks to democratic technology like youtube and twitter, facebook and myspace, all are artists and exposure comes at no price. Bieber used home-grown means to make a youtube video and the rest is history; he has some of the highest ratings and viewings of any performer in the world. And all he had to do was sit in his living room, strumming a guitar, singing above the din of his abode.

Don't get me wrong: this new credo is kind of amazing. I'm enabled by the world-at-large to do my damn thing, to creatively inspire based on my tenacious, infantile wisdom and off-the-cuff humor.

And who knows: maybe I'll be on The New Yorker's “20 Under 40 Issue” munching on duck fat fries in Brooklyn when the paparazzi storm in.

It could happen.

3

HOME:
1. too small bubble bath and books books
2. dog's head on my knee
3. neon wise men+ leftover champagne

HELL:
1. small talk only
2. sweat, open pores
3. no pasta

PARADISO:
1. beauty
2. dreamy sleep
3. boom box in the sky

BOREDOM:
1. no parrots
2. no rain
3. no al green

INDIA:
1. bubbling limca soda
2. hair cuts under silken trees, reflected in moon shaped mirrors
3. monkeys wrestling at Gandhi's bronzed feet

THIS NOW:
1. prayer beads
2. Midnight's Children specifically
3. a goldfish named pepe