Iris Apfel, the White Home textile veteran turned saucer-spectacled centenarian fashion icon, died on Friday at her house in Palm Seaside, Florida. The information was confirmed by Stu Loeser, a spokesman for her property. She was 102.

“I like massive and daring and numerous pizzazz,” Apfel introduced in Iris (2014), the Emmy Award-nominated documentary from the late Albert Maysles. The Gray Gardens director trailed Apfel haggling in Harlem (“I’m low-cost. What are you able to do on the coat? Oh, you are able to do higher than that”) and coveting $2 teddy bears and a studded cap for her doting husband, Carl (who died in 2015, aged 100). We see her lambasting fashionable designers to photographer Bruce Weber (“They don’t sew, they don’t drape, they’re media freaks”), educating on the College of Texas, collaborating with MAC Cosmetics, and presenting a CFDA Award to designer Alexander Wang.

An Unintended Icon

A self-declared “unintended icon,” straight-talking Apfel modeled for Vogue in 2018, the identical yr Mattel made a silver-haired Barbie in her title. In 2019, aged 97, she landed a modelling contract with IMG. “I’m very excited. I by no means had a correct agent,” she informed Ladies’s Put on Each day on the time. After Iris aired on Netflix, Apfel informed Vainness Truthful: “I’m so delighted with the response, I can’t recover from it. They’re carrying on about me as if I invented penicillin.”

With outlandish outfits, ice blue eyeshadow, and ruby crimson lips, Apfel’s more and more acquainted face appeared entrance row at runway reveals and glistened from newsstands in bell pepper inexperienced fits, raspberry coats, turquoise feather boas, and her trusty strolling cane. “I’m a complete workaholic, however by no means in my wildest goals did I believe I might be a canopy lady in my nineties,” she informed The Occasions of London.

“The essence of Apfel’s artwork, like that of most of the best filmmakers, is the artwork of montage,” The New Yorker famous in 2015. Or, as she would have put it: “Extra is extra and fewer is a bore.”

In 2005, 13 years after leaving Previous World Weavers, the material enterprise she based with Carl in 1950, the Russian-American retiree rolled into her new world as a “geriatric starlet” with extra splendor than a Fabergé feast. Whereas restoring materials and furnishings for the White Home below 9 presidents, from Harry Truman to Invoice Clinton (“I used to be a busy bee”), Apfel rustled up monikers from the “First Woman of Cloth” to “Our Woman of the Material,” however it was the way in which she dressed herself, and never interiors, that lastly landed her within the highlight.