Iris Apfel-Inspired Googly Eyes Collar

There has been a lot of talk about Iris Apfel since Albert Maysles' documentary about the New York-based 93-year-old interior designer, antique fabric expert, collector and style icon has been released.

Yet her story is not the tale of a boring clotheshorse, but of a woman with a lot of creativity, celebrated ten years ago by an exhibition at the Met Museum's Costume Institute entitled "Rara Avis: Selections from the Iris Apfel Collection".

The event featured around 40 objects, among them garments and accessories, the latter giving each outfit a special power and significance. At times the accessories were individually highlighted: modern plastic cuffs were juxtaposed to rare and traditional Asian jewellery pieces, while a brass and steel ammunition bullet belt was compared to a makeshift necklace made with Bakelite sample chips.

All the pieces included in that exhibition were testament to Apfel's witty and exuberant style: like the late Anna Piaggi, Apfel has been mixing in her ensembles high and low fashion pieces, designer garments with flea market finds, combining them according to texture, colour or pattern, without caring about period, provenance, and aesthetic conventions.

There were a lot of eye-catching pieces in that event and, apart from going to see her documentary, a good way to celebrate Iris Apfel would be to create something inspired from her collection.

In the book Rare Bird of Fashion that accompanied the Met exhibition there is for example a plastic necklace from the '80s matched with a couple of bangles from the 1970s covered in plastic and paper googly eyes. Moving from these two shades and with the main material employed for the bangle in my mind, I came up with a a felt and tulle collar.

It may not be ideal for summer, but it's terribly fun, ironic and silly, and it reminds us – like Iris also does in the documentary – that accessories are everything and that dressing, and indeed life, is nothing but experimenting, improvising, being imaginative and, above all, being yourself while preserving the sense of wonder that children have.