Taste you can learn,” Iris Barrel Apfel pronounces, peering over the black frames of her trademark oversize glasses. “But style is like charisma. You know it when you see it.” Apfel, it must be said, has both qualities—in spades. A maverick fashion icon who may pair a pink Krizia twinset with a Qing dynasty embroidered skirt, or a fur-trimmed Dior evening coat with jeans, she burst into black type in 2005, when an exhibition of her colorful and extravagantly accessorized wardrobe was a sensation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. Entitled “Rara Avis” (Latin for rare bird), the show transformed Apfel into what she cheekily calls a “geriatric starlet.” Since then she has become a byword for the kind of idiosyncratic sartorial flair that is an endangered species in our age of red-carpet fashion stylists. But few of her admirers realize she’s not only a very special breed of clotheshorse, she’s also someone for whom dress is just one form of creative expression.
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