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.