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Rara Avis: Selections from the Iris Barrel Apfel Collection
September 13, 2005–January 22, 2006
The Costume Institute, ground floor
An American original in the truest sense, Iris Barrel Apfel is one of the most vivacious personalities in the worlds of fashion, textiles, and interior design and has cultivated a personal style that is both witty and exuberantly idiosyncratic. Her originality is typically revealed in her mixing of high and low fashion—Dior haute couture with flea-market finds, Dolce & Gabbana striped leather trousers with a Zuni belt. With remarkable panache and discernment, she combines colors, textures, and patterns without regard to period, provenance, and, ultimately, aesthetic conventions. Paradoxically, her richly layered combinations—even at their most extreme and baroque—project a boldly graphic modernity. The exhibition inaugurates a new phase in the collecting and exhibiting of dress accessories by the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute. Highlights include individual accessories ranging from a Gripoix brooch to a Roger Jean-Pierre necklace, a Mexican turquoise and hammered-silver belt to a Central Asian silver choker, a pair of 18th-century paste earrings to a pair of modern plastic cuffs. In addition, fully accessorized ensembles from the 1950s to the present are shown as they were originally worn and styled by Mrs. Apfel in a fascinating examination of the power of dress and accessories to assert style above fashion, the individual above the collective.
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