“I’m not pretty, and I’ll never be pretty, but it doesn’t matter,” she once said. “I have something much better. I have style.”
Apfel enjoyed late-in-life fame on social media, amassing nearly 3 million followers on Instagram, where her profile declares: “More is more & Less is a Bore.” On TikTok, she drew 215,000 followers as she waxed wise on things fashion and style and promoted recent collaborations.
“Being stylish and being fashionable are two entirely different things,” she said in one TikTok video. “You can easily buy your way into being fashionable. Style, I think is in your DNA. It implies originality and courage.”
She never retired, telling Today: “I think retiring at any age is a fate worse than death. Just because a number comes up doesn’t mean you have to stop.”
“Working alongside her was the honour of a lifetime. I will miss her daily calls, always greeted with the familiar question: “What have you got for me today?,” Sale said in a statement. “Testament to her insatiable desire to work. She was a visionary in every sense of the word. She saw the world through a unique lens – one adorned with giant, distinctive spectacles that sat atop her nose.”
Apfel was an expert on textiles and antique fabrics. She and her husband Carl owned a textile manufacturing company, Old World Weavers, and specialized in restoration work, including projects at the White House under six different US presidents. Apfel’s celebrity clients included Estee Lauder and Greta Garbo.
Apfel’s own fame blew up in 2005 when the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute in New York City hosted a show about her called Rara Avis, Latin for “rare bird.” The museum described her style as “both witty and exuberantly idiosyncratic.”
Her originality is typically revealed in her mixing of high and low fashions — Dior haute couture with flea market finds, 19th-century ecclesiastical vestments with Dolce & Gabbana lizard trousers.” The museum said her “layered combinations” defied “aesthetic conventions” and “even at their most extreme and baroque” represented a “boldly graphic modernity.”
The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, was one of several museums around the country that hosted a travelling version of the show. Apfel later decided to donate hundreds of pieces to the Peabody — including couture gowns — to help them build what she termed “a fabuloujewellerys fashion collection.” The Museum of Fashion & Lifestyle near Apfel’s winter home in Palm Beach, Florida, also plans a gallery dedicated to displaying items from Apfel’s collection.
Apfel was born in New York City to Samuel and Sadye Barrel. Her mother owned a boutique.
Apfel’s fame in her later years included appearances in ads for brands like MAC cosmetics and Kate Spade. She also designed a line of accessories and jewellery for Home Shopping Network, collaborated with H&M on a sold-out-in-minutes collection of brightly-coloured apparel, jewellery and shoes, put out a makeup line with Ciaté London, an eyeglass collection with Zenni and partnered with Ruggable on floor coverings.
In a 2017 interview with AP at age 95, she said her favourite contemporary designers included Ralph Rucci, Isabel Toledo and Naeem Khan, but added: “I have so much, I don’t go looking.” Asked for her fashion advice, she said: “Everybody should find her own way. I’m a great one for individuality. I don’t like trends. If you get to learn who you are and what you look like and what you can handle, you’ll know what to do.”
She called herself the “accidental icon,” which became the title of a book she published in 2018 filled with her mementos and style musings. Odes to Apfel are abundant, from a Barbie in her likeness to T-shirts, glasses, artwork and dolls.
Apfel’s husband died in 2015. They had no children.
