HERVÉ PIERRE BRAILLARD is no fashion evangelist, but the other day Mr. Braillard, the self-effacing designer behind the Carolina Herrera label, was uncustomarily effusive. "Everyone is going to be talking about this," he predicted, this being "Rara Avis: Selections from the Iris Barrel Apfel Collection," the exhibition at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Since opening last month the show, assembled from the wardrobe of Mrs. Apfel, a New York society figure and a founder of a textile firm, has had people chattering with a heat and enthusiasm rare in the fashion world. Mr. Braillard himself was quick to spread the word, showering friends and acquaintances with phone calls and e-mail messages. "To miss this if you are in the fashion business makes no sense," he insisted.
Carla Fendi, Giorgio Armani and Karl Lagerfeld have taken in the exhibition of Mrs. Apfel's personal style, a rare look in a museum at a fashion arbiter, not a designer. Her approach is so inventive and brash that its like has rarely been glimpsed since Diana Vreeland put her exotic stamp on the pages of Vogue.
As the show's name suggests, Mrs. Apfel, who toots around town in signature bangles and owlish spectacles, is an oddball hybrid: a bird of paradise with a magpie eye for sorting and gathering. A mistress of the disjunctive effect, she likes to combine, as she did for the show, a fluffy couture evening coat made of red and green rooster feathers with red suede trousers slashed to the knees; a discreet rose-colored angora twin set found in England in the 1980's with a 19th-century Chinese brocade panel skirt, accented with a strand of jade beads that swing down past the mannequin's knees.
Her cultural Cuisinart approach simultaneously reflects fashion's love affair with mismatched styles and incongruity, and pushes it to new extremes. Minimalism may be fashion's next direction, but Mrs. Apfel's ornate bohemianism may tempt designers to reverse their course.
"This is a visionary show: nothing on this level has been done for years," said Rachel Crespin, a former fashion editor and designer, who is a design consultant for Ralph Lauren. "It will inevitably rub off on the fashion world."
It has already rubbed off on Ms. Crespin, who acknowledged that the sumptuous fabrics and decorative trims in the exhibition are likely to influence Mr. Lauren's fall 2006 collection. "The market has needed a jolt like this," she said.
Sawing away at a steak salad in the museum patrons' dining room this month, Mrs. Apfel, slim and erect at 84, affected the hearty and slightly bewildered manner of a woman who could not see what the fuss was about. "I've been called a lot of things in my day," she declared, "but I've never been called an inspiration."
Spendthrift comes more readily to mind. "People think that all I do is shop," she confided, but she has worked all her life, first as an interior designer and then, in the 50's, as a founder, with her husband, Carl Apfel, of Old World Weavers, a textile and design company. Their clients included Greta Garbo, Estée Lauder and Marjorie Merriweather Post, who clambered up to the Apfels' second-floor shop wearing sneakers.
Though Mrs. Apfel remains a consultant to the firm, which was sold 13 years ago, she acknowledged that she has been distracted lately. "I've played hooky so long that any day I'll walk in and they'll say, 'You're fired,' " she said, laughing.
Her style places her squarely in the company of a long-vanished breed of socially prominent style-setters of the first half of the 20th century, women whose authority in style matters was absolute. Ignoring the dictates of the runway in favor of a personal aesthetic in those days were maverick spirits like Millicent Rogers, a debutante of the 20's; Nancy Cunard; and Isabel Eberstadt, a society fixture of the 60's. They counted themselves among an influential minority for whom, as Ms. Eberstadt told Marylin Bender for a 1967 book, "The Beautiful People," "looking pretty is not so important as creating a mood."
