Iris Apfel: August 29, 1921 – March 1, 2024

“Over the last 100 years, I have learned style is everything. What better place to express yourself than the kitchen? To me, dressing a house and dressing a person are one and the same. It’s the same aesthetic. If you come into it, you know it’s my house. I think a house should reflect the people who live there.”

— Iris Apfel

It’s rare that I get to do an obituary write-up that hand delivers such a great kitchen quote and of course, it’s always a shame to find such gems when you are writing about someone who died.

And it’s a funny thing, to lament the loss of a human when they were so fortunate to live to 102! Which from the looks of it was really the most a human could ask for as far as retaining their faculties and exuberance for life. And I think that’s what makes Miss Apfel so magnanimous and special. Iris lived. There are so many humans in this section of my site who shone brightly but burned out far before they should have. When I think of Iris, I think of someone who found the secret to everlasting life. She figured out how the game worked.

Be unapologetically, you.

And that’s the message I hope you take from here because I went through scores of interviews with Iris and I can sum all of it up by saying, Iris don’t give a flying eff. She isn’t interested in telling people how to live and believes that is because you can’t. She doesn’t have any style advice because she says that-and I agree-you can’t teach style. You have to have the courage to be you, and I think that it is increasingly difficult to do that. The internet is full of algorithms that let’s be honest, are more often than not fueled by fury or standalone peieces meant to be reposted until it wears the algorithm out and something new catchs your fancy.

We also put a lot of pressure on our individuality meaning something. If we can’t share our lives, our art, our work, does it matter?

For the record, yes, yes it does.

Maybe none of us will get to be insta famous. We won’t get to live 102 years and be a gosh dang style icon. Proving that art and beauty can be ageless. Because-woof-I live in Los Angeles and it’s hecking brutal.

Iris is a legend and she doesn’t give AF. And look, ummmm money and connections certainly helped her. Things are different for us than they were before and I am cognizant of that.

But as a meandering fashionista. Lover of food. And devotee to living my life authentically. I can tell you that having style is priceless but you can also do it on the cheap. Some of my favorite outfits are from a thrift store and could be right described as hideous. But when I put them on I feel amazing and I think that we are all struggling to find that feeling. It’s a type of security that money cannot buy.

But anyways enough about that, where is the food tie in? I dug through the archives of Miss Apfel’s interviews and pulled some great quotes from a Vogue article about her Ambition Kitchen to inspire today’s recipe. You can check out the snippet below:

Vogue: What room in your home makes you happiest?

Iris: I have to admit that even though I'm not much of a cook, I do love the kitchen. There's a sense of warmth and homeliness and sense of well-being that you get in a kitchen. I think often it's overlooked, people think it’s a utilitarian space, but it should be made into something beautiful and useful at the same time.

Secondly, I have a lovely, wonderful terrace that sits out on the water. It's very relaxing to just lie there on the chaise and stare out into space. It's really quite beautiful and I'm so grateful that I have it.

Vogue: How is your style represented in your kitchen in particular? How do you balance your desired look with the need for utility?

Iris: I like to dress a kitchen. I have objects from my travels, like pitchers and bowls, that are both utilitarian and amusing. They go with the color scheme and just give the kitchen a flavor, along with personal things, like pictures on the wall and posters of past exhibitions.

Fortunately, in Palm Beach, I have a very nice spacious kitchen. It's kind of a relic of the past with two big windows and space. Empty space is what I lust after, like a normal woman lusts after sables and pearls.

Vogue: You’re hosting your dream dinner party with your favorite people. What would you serve?

Iris: I would start with lots of caviar and crab cakes for appetizers. Really good crab cakes and beautiful wine to complement. For the main course, I would order from a restaurant in Palm Beach. They have one of the most wonderful things I've ever eaten-- pizza. Pizza with a very thin, flaky crust, topped with truffles. And for dessert, delicious apple pie.

So in honor of Iris’ love for a truffle topped pizza I bring you a less pricier option that uses white truffle oil! Enjoy!

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Spicy Vegan White Pizza with Broccoli Rabe & Truffle Cream

Author Amber Carvaly

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Ingredients

Pizza Dough

• 250 g (about 1 1/2 cups) all-purpose flour
• 175 g (about 3/4 cups) warm water, 90-95°F
• 5 g (about 2 teaspoons) kosher salt
• 0.5 g (about 1/8 teaspoon) instant dried yeast

Truffled White Sauce

• ¾ cup cooked white beans like cannellini or navy beans
• 2 tablespoons water
• 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
• 1 tablespoon nutritional yeast (optional)
• 1 clove of garlic, peeled
• ¼ teaspoon white truffle oil
• sea salt & ground black pepper

Toppings

• ½ bunch broccoli rabe, tough stems removed and chopped
• 1 tablespoon olive oil, plus extra
• 6 oz/185 grams shiitake mushrooms, stemmed and sliced
• ¾ teaspoon smoked paprika
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 1 lb/454 grams pizza dough at room temperature
• flour of choice, for dusting
• 1 small shallot, thinly sliced
• 3-4 pickled pepperoncini peppers, drained and sliced
• ¼ cup sun dried tomatoes, sliced sliced
• 1 sprig oregano, leaves roughly chopped

Instructions

1. Lay a pizza stone on the bottom rack of a cold oven, ensuring that there’s enough clearance above to transfer the pizza. Preheat the oven to 500 degrees F. Although if you are like me and live in the world's smallest apartment you may not be able to get your oven that hot without setting off the smoke alarm. I have had great luck with 450 and 475 for pizza. So do what's safe!
2. Make the truffled white sauce: in an upright blender combine the white beans, water, lemon juice, nutritional yeast, garlic, truffle oil, salt, and pepper. Blend the mixture on high until completely smooth. The consistency should be similar to that of a creamy salad dressing: thick, but drips off of a spoon. Set aside.
3. Fill a large saucepan or deep skillet/braiser with water and bring it to a boil over high heat. Place the chopped broccoli rabe into the water and cook for 1 minute. Drain the broccoli rabe and run cold water over it to stop the cooking process. Dry the broccoli rabe with paper towels and set aside.
4. Wipe out the saucepan/braiser and set it back over medium-high heat. Pour in the tablespoon of olive oil. Add the sliced shiitake mushrooms to the pan. Let them sear for 1 minute. Stir them up and add the paprika and garlic. Let the mushrooms sear for another full minute. Season with salt and pepper and stir. They should be glistening and soft. Take the mushrooms off the heat, scrape them into a bowl, and set aside.
5. Dust your working surface and a pizza peel with flour OR line it with a piece of parchment paper. Start stretching out the dough until you have a 12-inch circle of even thickness. Carefully transfer the dough circle to the floured/papered peel. If you use the paper method, trim the paper so that you have a ½ inch border around the circle of dough.
6. Top the pizza with the truffled white sauce, broccoli rabe, shiitake mushrooms, shallots, pepperoncini peppers, sundried tomatoes, and oregano.
7. Jiggle the pizza peel to ensure that the pizza will come loose. If it’s sticking, carefully lift up the edges and toss in a bit more flour until it seems to loosen from the peel.
8. Open the oven and with equal measures of care and efficiency, slide the pizza off of the peel and onto the hot stone with a few flicks of your wrist (or just pull a tab of the parchment paper). Close the oven immediately.
9. Let the pizza cook for 7 minutes. Open the oven and, using the peel, rotate the pizza. Cook for an additional 5 minutes, or until the top crust is browning in spots and you can see some light char on the mushrooms.
10. Remove the pizza from the oven. Give the pizza a light drizzle of olive oil before slicing and serving.

1. Place the yeast and 1 tablespoon of the warm water in a small bowl and set aside.
2. Combine the flour and remaining warm water in a large bowl.
3. Mix by hand until just incorporated.
4. Cover and let rest for 20-30 minutes.
5. After it has rested, sprinkle the salt over the dough.
6. Stir the yeast mixture with your finger, then pour over the dough. Use a small piece of dough to wipe the remaining yeast goop from the small bowl, then add it back to the rest of the dough.
7. Mix by hand, wetting your working hand before mixing so the dough doesn't stick to you. (It's fine to rewet your hand three or four times while you mix.)
8. Reach underneath the dough and grab about one-quarter of it. Gently stretch this section of dough and fold it over the top to the other side of the dough. Repeat three more times with the remaining dough, until the salt and yeast are fully enclosed. This process is called applying a fold.
9. Continue to mix the dough by alternating folding and pinching the dough with your fingers to simulate the motion performed by a dough hook when using a stand up mixer. (I suppose you could just use a stand up mixer to knead the dough, but it really only takes me a few minutes, and the dough is so soft by this point that it's not a big deal at all). Once all the ingredients have been fully incorporated, and you can't feel the grains of salt in the dough, cover and let rest.
10. After 30-60 minutes, apply a fold to the dough to help develop the gluten.
11. After folding, lightly coat the dough and the bottom of the bowl with olive oil to help prevent sticking.
12. Cover and let rest until the dough is about double its original volume, about 6 hours after mixing.
13. Moderately flour a work surface. With floured hands, gently ease the dough out of the bowl onto the work surface in a somewhat even shape.
14. Dust the entire top of the dough with flour, then cut it into 2 equal-size pieces.
15. To shape the dough, apply a fold to each piece and then turn upside-down to seal the seam underneath.
16. Cradle the dough in both hands and gently stretch the dough from the top towards the sides and then under, rotating several times so that there is a nice, tight, even tension around the dough ball. Try not to degas the dough while doing this.
17. At this point I transfer each ball of dough to its own sandwich bag, dribble in a little olive oil to coat, and let it rest in the fridge overnight, up to 2 days. If you want to use it that day, let it rest at room temperature for 30-60 minutes and then refrigerate for at least 30 minutes to make the dough easier to shape.
18. When you're ready to use the pizza dough, place a pizza stone in the upper portion of your oven (about 8" below the broiler) and preheat to 600°F or as high as your oven can go (mine only goes to 550°F). After it has preheated, continue heating the pizza stone for another 30 minutes.

Iris Apfel, Eye-Catcher With a Kaleidoscopic Wardrobe, Dies at 102

She came to fame in the fashion world in her 80s and 90s, and her wildly eclectic closet of clothes formed a hit exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Iris Apfel, a New York society matron and interior designer who late in life knocked the socks off the fashion world with a brash bohemian style that mixed hippie vintage and haute couture, found treasures in flea markets and reveled in contradictions, died on Friday at her home in Palm Beach, Fla. She was 102.

Stu Loeser, a spokesman for her estate, confirmed the death.

Calling herself a “geriatric starlet,” Ms. Apfel in her 80s and 90s set trends with clamorous, irreverent ensembles: a boxy, multicolored Bill Blass jacket with tinted Hopi dancing skirt and hairy goatskin boots; a fluffy evening coat of red and green rooster feathers with suede pants slashed to the knees; a rose angora sweater set and 19th-century Chinese brocade panel skirt.

Her willfully disjunctive accessories might be a jeweled mask or a necklace of jade beads swinging to the knees, a tin handbag shaped like a terrier, furry scarves wrapped around her neck like a pile of pythons and, nearly always, her signature armloads of bangles and owlish spectacles, big as saucers.

She was tallish and thin, with a short crop of silver hair and scarlet gashes on lips and fingernails, a little old lady among the models at Fashion Week and an authentic Noo Yawk haggler at a shop in Harlem or a souk in Tunisia. Many called her gaudy, kooky, bizarre, even vulgar in get-ups like a cape of gold-tipped duck feathers and thigh-high fuchsia satin Yves Saint Laurent boots.

But she had a point.

“When you don’t dress like everybody else, you don’t have to think like everybody else,” Ms. Apfel told Ruth La Ferla of The New York Times in 2011 as she was about to go on national television, selling scarves, bangles and beads of her own design on the Home Shopping Network.

For decades starting in the 1950s, Ms. Apfel designed interiors for private clients like Greta Garbo and Estée Lauder. With her husband, Carl Apfel, she founded Old World Weavers, which sold and restored textiles, including many at the White House. The Apfels scoured museums and bazaars around the world for textile designs. She also added regularly to the huge wardrobe collections at her Park Avenue apartment in Manhattan.

The Apfels sold their company and retired in 1992, but she continued to act as a consultant to the firm and to be the otherworldly woman-about-town, a soaring free spirit known in society and to the fashion cognoscenti for ignoring the dictates of the runway in favor of her own artfully clashing styles.

In 2005, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, facing the cancellation of an exhibition and looking for a last-minute replacement, approached her with an audacious proposition: to mount an exhibition of her clothes. The Met had exhibited pieces from designer collections before, but never an individual’s wardrobe.

The show, “Rara Avis: Selections From the Iris Apfel Collection,” assembled 82 ensembles and 300 accessories in the museum’s Costume Institute: Bakelite bangles from the 1930s, Tibetan cuff bracelets, a tiger-pattern travel outfit of her own design, a husky coat of Mongolian lamb and squirrel from Fendi displayed on a mannequin crawling from an igloo.

“This is no collection,” Ms. Apfel said. “It’s a raid on my closet. I always thought to show at the Met you had to be dead.”

Harold Koda, the curator who helped organize the show, said: “To dress this way, there has to be an educated visual sense. It takes courage. I keep thinking, Don’t attempt this at home.”

Soon the show was the talk of the town. Under an avalanche of publicity, students of art, design and social history crowded into the galleries with the limousine society crowd, busloads of tourists and classes of chattering children. Carla Fendi, Giorgio Armani and Karl Lagerfeld took it in.

“A rare look in a museum at a fashion arbiter, not a designer,” The Times called the show, adding, “Her approach is so inventive and brash that its like has rarely been glimpsed since Diana Vreeland put her exotic stamp on the pages of Vogue.”

Almost overnight, Ms. Apfel became an international celebrity of pop fashion — featured in magazine spreads and ad campaigns, toasted in columns and blogs, sought after for lectures and seminars. The University of Texas made her a visiting professor. The Met show traveled to other museums, and, like a rock star, she attracted thousands to her public appearances.

Mobs showed up for her bookstore signings after the 2007 publication of “Rare Bird of Fashion: The Irreverent Iris Apfel,” a coffee-table book of her wardrobe and jewelry by the photographer Eric Boman.

“Iris,” an Albert Maysles documentary, opened at the New York Film Festival in 2014, and in 2015 it was seen by enthusiastic movie audiences in America and Britain. The Times movie critic Manohla Dargis called it an “insistent rejection of monocultural conformity” and “a delightful eye-opener about life, love, statement eyeglasses, bracelets the size of tricycle tires and the art of making the grandest of entrances.”

In 2016, Ms. Apfel was seen in a television commercial for the French car DS 3, became the face of the Australian fashion brand Blue Illusion, and began a collaboration with the start-up WiseWear. A year later, Mattel created a one-of-a-kind Barbie doll in her image. It was not for sale.

In 2018, she published “Iris Apfel: Accidental Icon,” an autobiographical collection of musings, anecdotes and observations on life and style. As she turned 97 in 2019, she signed a modeling contract with the global agency IMG.

Iris Barrel was born on Aug. 29, 1921, in Astoria, Queens, the only child of Samuel Barrel, who owned a glass and mirror business, and his Russian-born wife, Sadye, who owned a fashion boutique. Iris studied art history at New York University and art at the University of Wisconsin, worked for Women’s Wear Daily, and apprenticed with the interior designer Elinor Johnson before opening her own design firm.

She married Carl Apfel, an advertising executive, in 1948. They had no children. Her husband died in 2015 at the age of 100.

Their Old World Weavers had restored curtains, furniture, draperies and other fabrics at the White House for nine presidents, from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton.

Ms. Apfel’s apartments in New York and Palm Beach were full of furnishings and tchotchkes that might have come from a Luis Buñuel film: porcelain cats, plush toys, statuary, ornate vases, gilt mirrors, fake fruit, stuffed parrots, paintings by Velázquez and Jean-Baptiste Greuze, a mannequin on an ostrich.

The fashion designer Duro Olowu told The Guardian in 2010 that Ms. Apfel’s work had a universal quality. “It’s not a trend,” he said. “It appeals to a certain kind of joy in everybody.”