Styles all their own

Apfel’s fashions, Belin’s photos spotlight creativity, individuality

October 24, 2009|Mark Feeney, Globe Staff

SALEM - I can cite, nearly to the minute and inch, my most overwhelming firsthand encounter with true style. It occurred around 3 o’clock on the afternoon of Sept. 7, 2001, in the Upper East Side apartment of the writers Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. I can cite it so precisely because, afterward, you don’t forget being in New York on the Friday before 9/11.

Dunne was working in another room, occasionally padding around barefoot in shorts and a T-shirt - a dress code I salute. The sense of style all belonged to Didion. She wore an oversize, severely cut white blouse, black trousers, and no jewelry. As she gestured, a man’s wristwatch (it had been her father’s) slid up and down her stalk of a forearm. That was it for fashion and adornment. Yet with the merest flick of her wrist, I swear, Didion could have torched every tent in Bryant Park. What absolute innate chic is, I can’t say, but I know it when I see it, and Didion had it.

Iris Apfel has it, too - and that’s not easy to do when your maiden name is “Barrel.’’ It’s an almost preposterously different sort of chic from Didion’s. It’s also different from, say, Diana Vreeland’s or Coco Chanel’s or Audrey Hepburn’s. But that’s the point, isn’t it? Fashion moves in stiletto’d lockstep, while style is utterly individual. You don’t have to take more than a few steps into “Rare Bird of Fashion: The Irreverent Iris Apfel,’’ which runs at the Peabody Essex Museum through Jan. 18, to know that she’s the good turtle soup, not merely the mock.

Now 88, Apfel occupies a middle ground between fashion maker and fashion consumer. She and her husband, Carl, founded a textile firm, Old World Weavers, in 1952. For years, she was on the lookout for fabrics and styles throughout the world that the company could produce.

Apfel designed several items in the more than 80 ensembles in the show, which originated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. But she’s more organizer than creator, an impresaria of her own appearance, the practitioner of a kind of high-end garment bricolage. Think of her as a very elaborate version of a Rauschenberg combine. “I just mix and put things together,’’ Apfel says, “the way the spirit moves me.’’

There is a vast, even bewildering variety to the garments on display. Still, certain elements and themes recur. A fondness for layers. An enthusiastic, even unrestrained, embrace of color. A ferocious attachment to accessorizing (the way you and I breathe, Apfel accessorizes). A partiality to certain designers: Nina Ricci, Monies, Ferré, de la Renta (though many, many other names crop up).