Iris Apfel, fashion collector and designer, interior decorator, businesswoman
Flowers are very much worn, & Fruit is still more the thing – Eliz: has a bunch of Strawberries, & I have seen Grapes, Cherries, Plumbs & Apricots – There are likewise Almonds& raisins, french plums & Tamarinds at the Grocers, but I have never seen any of them in hats — Jane to Cassandra, 1799, Bath to Steventon
Dear friends and readers,
I hasten to recommend this 83 minute documentary, Iris, by Albert Maysles — lest it disappear from the DC area quickly. I regret that last year I did not see the 83 minute documentary on a nun’s life, Ida, so allow me not to make the same mistake again.
Iris is a more revealing quietly sensitive film than it seems at first: Maysles presents a creative idiosyncratic woman who expressed herself through buying outlandish and interesting clothes, jewelry and encased herself in worlds and closetfuls of artistic and craft objects. The Metropolitan Museum show of her art called her rightly a rare bird of fashion. At the time of this film Apfel is 91, and that is part of the subject too. Iris is filmed to make clear her ugly, aging ravaged face and body, how she uses such heavy accessories to hide behind. But when younger she used them as expressions of an aesthetic of materialism. Albert Maysles is himself aging. We see how painful it is to age because both people dread losing their memories, their past and in her case her husband, her other self.
As it began, I was tempted to leave. The feel was of a crass commercial with a ludicrously over-accessorized very elderly woman who shrugged at the cinematographer. Maysles shows how she appears commercially and then he cuts away to delve the real person behind the pragmatic protective mask. Like Joan Rivers’ biography film, this documentary is a defense of high and low and all kinds of fashion, of crassness too, of an aesthetic which values over-the-top show of the self dressed up to the point where the outfits acquire a strange beauty and at least to the eye transform the self.
It takes place in the present as we follow Iris around for a few recent weeks or months in this last phase of her existence. Maysles slips what footage and photos Apfel has of herself from the past in and out of the present to give us a sense of her career. She had begun as a clerk at Lowman’s, been spotted as intensely sincerely interested in what she was selling. She somehow moved from the respect she garnered there, to a job in a higher fashion store, and then there is a gap (we are not told) and we see her traveling about Europe buying up fabrics, tourist souvenirs of all sorts, statues, pictures, sacred objects, seeming junk in markets around Europe, to estate sales of the wealthy and aristocratic class. Probably she was one of those people hired to make the cloth that is used for dresses, as a textile designer. I surmise that was the craft she based her original success and money-making on. She did not emphasize this part of her aesthetic at first but produced very 1950s style women’s high fashion art.
But by the time she was in her mid-30s to 40s (from the photos) she had developed a thriving business selling exquisitely embroidered, woven, artfully-crafted batches of cloth to museums, designers who used such materials, private rich people, something like Old Weavers Inc. We watch her travel about the world from super-expensive building in which there is an impoverished craft show to small tribal and town places where artisans still survive.
You gather that as time progresses she began to lament the pushing off the stage of craftsmen, of cloth that is not manufactured from sheer chemicals. Of machine-made uniform cloths, outfits, boring unalive junk. She collected her objects more greedily. She respected and admired craft, beauty, humanly made things of all sorts. She is attracted to the bizarre and gradually herself became more bizarre as she aged. The stuffed recreations of animals she has remind us of young adorable (if you are susceptible) children, adolescents, and she buys them wherever she can pick unusual and touching and funny ones up. She collects toys too — she does like manufactured items, but those which show alert intelligent playfulness. She had no children. Of her relatives there seems to be only a nephew left.
Apfel had become known around NYC: she was for decades a consultant to store-owners making window display; she went round to fashion shows and (presumably) got to know people who haunted such places. We see her mounting windows for more expensive famous department stores in NYC. She lived and was known in the areas of Florida where Jewish people live and where there are retired comfortably well off people. She does not seem to have attracted any coutures in Europe though the types found there show up at her parties. She took what she did for a business as seriously as she takes dressing herself. She went on TV and did interviews; she showed daytime TV watchers how to dress themselves in ways they liked, that people admired them for, that made them stand out alluringly. We see her also in very vulgar shows on TV and while she fits in we see as opposed to others, she does not talk cant.
From the Met show
Her breakthrough to celebrity and more money and prestige came when the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY mounted an exhibit of her costume art. The Met curator of costume and furniture and objects had had a show cancelled (due to conflicts he did not specify) and needed a show in its place. The Met curator had seen Apfel’s huge stores of objects. We are shown apartments with double-height closets, a warehouse and he thought her stuff could replace the show he had been planning. It seems it was he who brought out into the public the bizarre, exotic and extraordinary nature of her creations; they had gone far beyond the ordinary fashion outfit.
This was part of the poster advertisements for the Met show
It was mounted beautifully and the show was (somewhat unexpectedly) a tremendous sale-out, a hit, covered in the public media everywhere.
Again from the Met show
Within a decade or so she was given an honorary degree in the Fine Arts Institute of NYC and teaching classes pragmatically and artistically. That Museum show (Rare Bird of Fashion) traveled about the US and led to other museum exhibits, and these to an appointment in the Fashion Institute of NYC (as a professor who taught the practical angle of becoming a successful fashion and interior designer, maker of costumes and clothes).
Palm Beach version of the show
We are not shown how but we surmize she must’ve been a past mistress at getting herself accepted, respected, consulted in the richest most notable fashion circles in the US. She has all the mainstream values; there is no socialism in this woman; she is an individual entrepreneur, travels with the rich and elite. Yet she was born in NYC, Queens and never lost her accent, remained the suburb type who haunts thrift shops without being the least bohemian. In a way she is a hoarder. Perhaps this is why she never made the cross-over professionally (to be paid large amounts) outside the corridors of NYC and related places in the US. Europeans and non-western types are at her parties but her shows did not travel there, nor the unusual yet stylish ways she dressed women. Thus this young student from the Institute imitating her only shows her superficial appearance as it might seem to a young girl trying not to be mainstream.
Iris was far more bourgeois, something out of a Doris Day movie, more philistine (and greedy for gorgeous and with an eye for unusual things). Not an overt idealist.
Her idea is you have one life to live and ask yourself what you enjoy most. She loves dressing up. She prefers the garish to the subtle, large jewelry to small. But she is intensely alive to and appreciative of tribal creations which are often quieter, at least in traditional cultures. As of 2015 she had five apartments and one warehouse filled with her finds, a warehouse of extraordinary numinous as well a politically-resonant objects.
Apfel continues to work hard, finding her unusual and beautiful objects in flea markets to local Armory an estate sales, the liquidation of movie moghuls. She endlessly saves (so to speak) eclectic finds:
The secondary thread is her aging and her love for and care of and concern for her husband. He is with her throughout all the years and now deeply dependent. There are a few shots of Miami where one of their apartments is, and numerous silhouettes and daytime shots of well-known Manhattan streets of shops and upper end avenues scattered throughout the film but they come in more towards the end. We don’t see much of their private life except as they travel and shop and go to shows of fashion together, but we see how they supported and helped and were together always. She is asked if she regrets not having children; it seemed to me she did not regret this at all but felt she had to say she did and then we get this speech about how you have to give up things for your career. This is used as part of the trailer as if it’s the film’s theme. She is at the time of the film herself weakening; she broke her hip and hid from her husband that she had an operation in the hospital that afternoon. Of course she went to the “best” aka the most famous of doctors in the most famous of hospitals and had elite care. We see them go in and out of hospitals dependent on paid people and friends. Her husband nearly 100 is failing. She protects him. Early and in the middle of the film she is walking with him, he is ever by her side (not her by his side). And at the end she walks in NYC alone as he cannot walk with her.
The director allows himself to be filmed filming Iris towards the middle of the film and towards the end we see a stalwart woman coping with aging. She succeeded because she is thick-skinned, has mainstream goals (ambition), and worked hard ceaselessly networking, socializing. Her long-term trusted housekeeper is there towards the end, protective of her employer: I assume she has been well-paid, anyway I hope so.
Then at the close we see Iris at long last selling off a vast warehouse of precious objects (paintings, statues, funny toys, and endless jewels and clothes) to buyers. The film turns plangent. These are sites of memories. Her happiest moments were buying, and her memories of the places and circumstances she bought things in. But she remains smart (it is the appropriate word). Her spontaneous (she is lucky in that she is utterly neurotypical in her social ways) outburst against cosmetic surgery ought to be replayed to all actresses now in their forties and tempted to destroy the muscle and other elements of their faces attached to their brains in order to simulate youth.
Take the time to watch and hear:
What is fashion? it is not a concern for the reality of a woman’s body but rather as an object to be decorated by her arts and a vision of what is alluring. This is quintessentially a woman’s film, about a certain kind women’s art, even if it has often been men who are the fashion designers for those who value appearances. It’s even a ghostly kind of thing as the point is not to reveal the inner vulnerable self, to go against biology in a way, at the very least ignore it.
Whenever this summer I see a woman’s film or one by a woman (Gemma Bovary by Anne Fontaine is coming to my local art theater) I will report about it here.
Ellen
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