Iris Apfel
“More is more, and less is a bore.” The most rigorous maximalist who ever lived.
The signature: Oversized round glasses and stacked bangles
Iris Apfel is usually filed under eccentricity, which undersells her considerably. She was an interior designer and textile specialist who worked on restoration projects at the White House across nine administrations, and her dressing was not chaos — it was a system, applied with unusual discipline for about seventy years.
The system had three parts. First, the glasses: enormous round black frames occupying roughly a third of her face, treated explicitly as jewellery rather than as a medical device. She wanted them to be the first thing you saw, and they were. Second, accumulation — bangles stacked to the elbow, several necklaces at once, statement rings on multiple fingers. Third, and the part almost everyone misses, deliberate mixing of price.
That last point is the genuinely useful one and she said it plainly: she was as happy wearing three-dollar bangles as valuable pieces, and she liked to put high and low together as the spirit moved her. In a field organised almost entirely around signalling what things cost, that is close to a radical position, and it is the reason her look could never be bought — only built.
She also demonstrated something no trend report can, which is that a signature strengthens with time. Seventy years of the same round frames turned an eccentricity into an identity.
What transfers
Mixing expensive and cheap deliberately is not a compromise, it is a technique — and it is the only one that produces something nobody can copy by spending. Also: pick your thing and keep it for decades. Repetition is what turns a preference into a signature.
Sources
- CNBC — 10 life lessons from a 96-year-old who is probably cooler than you (read Aug 16, 2026)
- Doyle — Iris Apfel: Fashion Icon (read Aug 16, 2026)
