An excellent scout, my partner returned from London with the current issue of British fashion magazine Dazed and Confused—the one with Iris Apfel on the cover. Editor-in-Chief Tim Noakes writes, “It’s not every month you get to put a 91-year-old on the cover of a magazine obsessed with alternative youth culture.” A fearless visionary, Apfel earned it. A 2005 exhibition of her clothing at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, their first about a living woman who is not a designer, was a smash. Yet in Dazed she makes it very clear that fashion is not her life. “I think getting dressed is wonderful and I love it, but there’s a whole big world outside of the closet.” She’s just as frank about growing old: “It’s terrible how women these days are silently and subliminally bombarded with a fear of aging. The advertising is disgusting.… You can look beautiful at any age, but you have to be intelligent enough to know that if you’re 90 and you go and get your face carved up, no one is going to think you’re 25.”
I loved tween-fashion-blog phenomenon Tavi Gevenson’s response to a note from Noakes about the upcoming cover girl. “If I’m ever disappointed about anything, just thinking about Iris makes me feel inspired again…I hope to be like her ASAP, not just once I’m her age.” An old person in training at the tender age of 16, and fellow fearless fashionista, Gevenson is way ahead of the game.