Iris Apfel’s talent to amaze

This is a book like no other. Part artwork and part compendium of a lifetime’s experience in design, it is meant to be looked at as much as read. Nor is it titled Colourful for nothing: entire pages are in vivid hues of vermilion, lime green, canary yellow, emerald and toffee. On them are displayed illustrations, patterns of fabric and family photographs, interspersed with chunks of prose or aphorisms. In short, it is an expression of its author’s philosophy, threaded through rather disjointedly with the story of her life.

Iris Apfel is the only woman I can think of – with the possible exceptions of Diana Vreeland and Helena Rubinstein – who turned extreme plainness into an aspect of personal style. She was instantly recognisable with her huge round spectacles, bright red lipstick, waterfall of necklaces and her ensembles, that were, to say the least, original. In President Nixon’s time, since she thought the White House underheated, she attended a meeting with him wearing the thick tunic of a priest, accessorised with thigh-high boots and an armful of chunky bangles. She took no notice of fashion, although Vogue called her ‘one of the industry’s oldest taste-makers’.

Apfel died earlier this year, but not before, approaching her 102nd birthday last summer, she had completed this volume, described by her as her ‘legacy’ book. She begins with a personal credo:

Colour… affects how we think, feel, see the world. The colours that resonate with us are a visual representation of our personalities. We need colour in our lives because life can be very drab – on the worst days, an absolute wasteland.

Photographs of Iris herself illustrate this. Here she is with every inch swathed in brilliant red (‘pastels make me nervous’); there in canary yellow; on another page in dramatic monochrome.