Rare Bird of Fashion: The Irreverent Iris Apfel

This beautifully photographed book celebrates the style of fashion maverick Iris Apfel, who, over the past fifty years, has cultivated a personal chic that is exuberantly idiosyncratic. Combining genres, colours, textures and patterns without regard to period, provenance or aesthetic convention, she is one of the few style icons of our time. As the art critic Roberta Smith commented in The New York Times, ‘Before multiculturalism was a word, Mrs Apfel was wearing it.’

More than ninety sumptuous colour plates, photographed by Eric Boman, show off a selection of extraordinary outfits on wittily posed mannequins, styled by Iris Apfel as she would wear them, while detailed captions describe all elements of the ensembles, including their designers, fabrics and accessories.

Whether the pieces come from Parisian maisons de couture, American antique fairs, North African souks, Middle Eastern bazaars or tiny ateliers where they have been made to Apfel’s own design, her highly original strategy of dressing constitutes a remarkable artistic exercise.

Complete with a perceptive preface by Eric Boman, an introduction deconstructing the Apfel allure by celebrated fashion authority Harold Koda, an autobiographical text by Iris Apfel herself and more than sixty vintage photographs from her personal collection, this book is a celebration of a way of dressing-up that is nothing less than inspiring, life-enhancing, theatrical spectacle.