Iris (2014)

Synopsis: A documentary featuring 94-year old New Yorker and fashion maven, Iris Apfel.

Legendary doco-maker Albert Maysles has turned his camera onto this unforgettable woman in a short and sweet look at a most unusual life. Coming shortly after Advanced Style, a film on older New York women with pizzazz, Iris is another take on heading into a dotage with a difference.

Iris Apfel, born in 1921, was the daughter of a fashion boutique owner and from an early age helped her mother with store windows. A fine arts graduate, Iris went on to run her own interior design business and with her husband Carl (now 100 years old) spent years restoring fabrics in museum collections. Travelling world-wide for her work she soon began to collect clothing and jewellery for herself. Her style, described as “original and fearless” soon became renowned, and now, in her advancing years, she finds herself on the pages of magazines like Vogue and Harpers Bazaar, as well as having one-woman shows of her “stuff”.

The film feels like we are “hanging out” with Iris and being given a personal tour of her life and her attitudes to clothing and accessories. The movie rambles around beginning with Iris telling how she sees fashion as improvising, sort of like jazz. We visit her apartment, crammed to the hilt with clothing, jewellery and bizarre knick knacks. As she shows us an eclectic mix of jackets and bangles, we quickly grasp that her sense of style, which for many of us would be outrageous, for her is the essence of who she is. She combines expensive pieces, with flea-market bargains, ethnic bits and pieces and items she designs herself. What I would turn into a hotch-potch, Iris turns into something extraordinary – a sort of moving piece of modern art. She laments that everything today is so homogenised. She reflects that she was never classically pretty and that people who are not pretty can become more interesting.

Various people, photographers, museum curators, and fashion retailers sing Iris's praises and it’s inspiring to see her life’s work has given rise to some significant exhibitions. But now she is packing up a lot of it, lovingly placed in tissue paper lined boxes and giving it away to a museum.

Never less than fun and interesting, this woman is almost a homage to the possibilities that can emerge if you are brave and outrageous. She is also testament to those rarely found nonagenarians who retain a total sense of exuberance, humour and passion for life – still working flat out!

There is nothing ground-breaking here, at times it’s like accompanying Iris during her hectic average day. While the film goes back in time a little, with some old photo albums of her earlier years, I never got to feel I really knew the woman underneath the gaudy exterior. But with such a fascinating exterior, and so many years of eccentricity mingled with down-to-earth philosophies, she is a worthwhile person to spend a little time with in the cinema. It is a bitter-sweet irony though that this cheery film was Maysles’ last, as he died at the age of 88 soon after its completion .

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