“I was probably the first woman to wear jeans – sounds crazy – it was.” Aged 93, she turns 94 next month, Iris Apfel is perhaps one of the oldest women still wearing jeans today, as the members of your granny’s bridge club will likely concede (softer textures fair better on aging skin presumably).
A late replacement for a Met exhibition in 2005, Apfel’s unique style has been a constant source of curiosity for the fashion industry now for a decade; even longer for those who knew her prior to the exposure ‘Rara Avis: Selections from the Iris Apfel Collection’ received.
Her bold exterior has since been consumed by magazine covers, guest panels and shopping channels, her aesthetic absorbed by fashion labels and department stores; and now she is the subject of a much hyped documentary.
The final project from the late Albert Maysles – the director behind big and little Edie’s screen time in ‘Grey Gardens’ – ‘Iris’ opens nationwide today with the former interior designer dishing out high fives (or, you know, style advice) at multiple screenings.
Wholly independent of either, the correlation between ‘Iris’, Richard Press’s ‘Bill Cunningham: New York’ and ‘Advanced Style’ by Ari Seth Cohen is fully conceivable, the trajectory of each intercepted with another: New York and its style orientated seniors are the nucleus of every story, and it’s instantly apparent in ‘Iris’.
There’s a charming moment in Maysles’ film (there are many charming moments in Maysles’ film), where at a big event, almost blind to their surrounding parties, Apfel invites Cunningham to dinner; it could be any pair of mature friends, but the bubble within which it occurs produces a delicious observation of just how unaffected each is.
Elsewhere the love story (real, compassionate, no fuss) between Iris and her husband Carl plays out, culminating in his 100th birthday party towards the end of the film, at which Iris delivers the line “in the words of my grandpa, a woman is as old as she looks, but a man is never old until he stops looking”; then there’s the meet and greet scenario between her and Kanye West, at which a mutual respect almost reduces West to a starstruck kid; later you see Apfel making the horns sign amongst her students from University of Texas.
And did we mention that she carries her coppers in a transparent sandwich bag?
A shorter feature then her Netflix contemporaries (Cunningham and co.), ‘Iris’ is an affectionate glance at the nonagenarian’s engrossing and ongoing story, with Dries van Noten and Bruce Webber amongst those along for the ride, offering personal anecdotes of the woman behind the XXL frames.
It will produce giggles, namely on account of the toys that fill the couple’s homes and the naturally comedic rapport between them, but predominantly it conjures a sense of awe, the kind a static exhibition could never properly capture.
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