Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Culture

Iris Apfel: a Jewish Collector of Great Style

88-year-old Iris Barrel Apfel, born to a Jewish family in Astoria, Queens, has long inspired a fashion world in-crowd with her sharp eye for mixing and matching accessories in serendipitous, joyous ways. A inspired collector and shopper, not a designer, Apfel is being honored with a traveling exhibit of her fashion finds, “Rare Bird of Fashion: The Irreverent Iris Apfel” which runs until February 7, 2010 at The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, after previous stopovers at New York’s Metropolitan Museum; the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida; and the Nassau County Museum of Art.

Examples of her witty juxtapositions on display include a Lanvin silk taffeta gown accessorized with a 19th century silver and amber arm bracelet from Bhutan, and cuff bracelet from Tibet, . These pan-cultural mixes gave Apfel a reputation for eccentricity years ago, but her ardent fans include Jewish designer Isaac Mizrahi, who recently told The Boston Globe that until recently, people “thought of Iris as a nut. I never thought she was a nut. I thought she had a great eye and was amazing.’’

Other amazed friends include the Paris-based Israeli designer Alber Elbaz, described by Apfel in a recent interview as “just like a Jewish mother. He [is] so sweet. I think he’s a big talent. And I always like when someone is a talent and a person.” Clearly both of these herself, Apfel is a fiery, passionate collector, like Walter Benjamin, whose essay “Unpacking My Library” asserts that “ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects.” For sharing her brightly vivid intimacies, thanks are due to Iris Apfel.

Watch two short videos below. The first is a short interview with Iris Apfel, produced for the Peabody Essex Museum exhibition, Rare Bird of Fashion: The Irreverent Iris Apfel.”

The second is a short video on Iris Apfel’s design of a window display at Nordstrom Northshore in Peabody, Massachusetts last month.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.