I just watched IRIS on Netflix--a documentary about a ninety-year-old fashion icon, still working, still dressing in her wonderfully outlandish attire. She calls herself a "geriatric starlet."
"I'm not pretty, never was," she says. "I don't like pretty." But she has a unique sense of her own style--and inspires fashionistas, museum curators and people on the streets of New York. She wears big round glasses and thick layers of large, chunky costume jewelry. "Everything is so homogenized now," she says. "I can't stand to be conventional."
Conventional she is not. Every time she leaves home, she's dressed, a walking painting or sculpture. Her 100-year-old husband, Carl, adores her and says, "Anything for my baby." He has a twinkle in his eye as he watches her trying on clothes. "She's never boring, that's for sure."
What she values most in herself and her friends--curiosity and a sense of humor. Her advice: whatever your art form, you should "follow your curiosity."
Tomorrow, I will do the second photo-shoot for Bonnie and Deb's book: interviews with women over 80. I look forward to meeting these women and doing my best to capture something of their essences in black and white.
I'm glad to be a small part of a project that celebrates the star qualities of aging--a wider perspective, wisdom, and life experience that gives warmth and shadows to the face.
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Carl died this past August--just three days shy of his 101st birthday. Iris Apfel, born August 29, 1921, still lives and works in New York.
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