A RARE BIRD OF FASHION

Her style is irreverent, influential, and unflaggingly creative.
Iris Apfel is my fashion hero.

"A small entourage hangs on every one of 88-year-old Iris Apfel's delicious syllables as she strolls through the galleries at Peabody Essex Museum-galleries that are currently overrun with the contents of her Park Avenue closets.

Yes, this fashion trailblazer explains, those are insects floating in layers of resin and set into bracelets. That multicolored necklace is made of 1930's Bakelite chips that a salesman once used.

Designer names are dropped in rapid succession along with stories about incredible flea market finds, and close friendships that were formed over James Galano's evening wear and frantic rack digging at Loehmanns.

Iris Apfel is not a fashion designer. She is, however, a world-class shopper! She readily confesses that it is not about how much you spend, but what you dig up.  She has an uncanny skill for putting together a Nina Ricci dress with a tag sale brooch, or pairing African beads with a Bill Blass jacket and making it look perfectly fabulous.

She started mixing high end with low end decades before it was the norm. 'Her creation of her image is just as artistic as any of the individual haute couture pieces from her wardrobe' says Harold Koda, curator of the Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 'It's art in the sense that her materials are from this incredible collection she has amassed, and she uses them the way a painter uses paint'."
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This article was taken from the Boston Globe. Click on the title of this post to read the entire amazing article.