Iris Apfel Wants to See More Originality in Fashion

POPSUGAR: Tell me about your creative process when designing this collection.

Iris Apfel: It's hard work. They [the H&M team] let me know what they like. I put together some ideas. We did all this by Zoom and transatlantic, so it was very exciting. And then once you decide, you start to work on the details. And one thing follows another. If it's a piece of clothing, it's one thing. If it's a room, it's something else. There has to be some sort of framework. You have to have some architecture, or it falls apart — so many things do because there's no underpinning.

PS: What I like about this collection is that it's at an accessible price point. How do you feel about the democratization of fashion?

IA: I'm a great one for high fashion at an intelligent price. Sometimes I go into a store and I look at this and I go, "Oh my God! You'd need two sugar daddies to buy that one." *laughs*

I think clothes are important, but it's not the end of the world. It sounds crazy spending $20,000 on a dress. It's a little bit dippy. Things can be made at an intelligent price if people would work at it. People somehow think if something is not expensive, it's gotta be shoddy, but that's not true. That's why I'm so thrilled. Nobody has done it as well as H&M.

Why shouldn't people have good clothes and interesting-looking, offbeat things at a decent price? If you can afford it — or maybe you can afford it, but you just don't want to swindle that kind of money — why shouldn't all these wonderful things be available? So that's my mission, and that's what I do in all my designing, for everything.

PS: How do you feel about fashion right now?

IA: I'm very sad. Everybody is afraid. Everybody copies everybody else. There's no originality, there's no creativity. Everything looks the same. You go down an important street, and in every window, everything looks the same except priced differently. It's pitiful.

PS: How do you define personal style?

IA: I think personal style is mostly attitude: how you look at things, how you perceive things, how you want the world to perceive you. But everything is a matter of perception. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

PA: So how do people find their personal style?

IA: They have to get to know who they are, see how comfortable they are with working at it. Some people get so nervous and so upset about their clothes. They get neurotic about it, and I always say, "If it's gonna make you upset, it's better to be healthy than well-dressed."