“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.
Footnote: I met this extraordianary woman at a restaurant in Peabody, MA during the North Shore store opening. She was and still is timeless.
Footnote: I met this extraordianary woman at a restaurant in Peabody, MA during the North Shore store opening. She was and still is timeless.