American fashion icon and interior designer Iris Apfel has passed away aged 102. Her death was announced via a post to her Instagram account on Saturday morning Australian time.
Apfel rose to stardom and became a household name in the fashion world in her 80s, self-describing as a “geriatric starlet” per the Washington Post.
“Just because you get to a certain number doesn’t mean you have to roll up into a ball and wait for the grim reaper,” she told Dazed magazine in 2012. Icon behaviour, no doubt.
After initially spending her life in the textile industry, she properly burst onto the public fashion scene when pieces from her personal wardrobe made an appearance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute in New York City.
“I can’t tell people how to have style. No amount of money can buy you style,” she once said in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph. “It’s just instinctive. . . . You have to learn who you are first, and that’s painful.”
She continued working throughout her later years, saying that “At 100, what else is there to do except sit around? I don’t play bridge. I don’t play golf. I love to work, and I really enjoy what I do”.
Her place of death was at her home in Palm Beach, Florida.
Header photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for Central Park Tower
