Photo Credit: Courtesy of Iris Apfel
BY THE LATE 1940s, my interior-decorating business had taken off. One day, while working on this beautiful home on Long Island, I was looking for fabric, well, to be exact, a vision of a fabric I had conjured up in my head—but I was sure it had to exist in a showroom in New York City. I wanted that fabric and I couldn’t find it. It didn’t exist. I was going absolutely mad.
As luck would have it, I ran into a young woman I had gone to school with. She was working for a fabric wholesaler, so I asked her if she knew where I might find the fabric I imagined. She said she didn’t know, but if I wanted something special, perhaps I might want to go see her father. As it turned out, her father was reputed to be a textile genius. He had come to America from southern Italy with a few handlooms and set them up in Paterson, New Jersey, where he sold the wondrous fabrics he produced. Eventually, he opened a little mill in Long Island City and worked for fabric wholesalers like Scalamandré, Lee Jofa, and Schumacher.
I went to see Papa and told him about the fabric I was after. He told me to come back with the design I was talking about, and if he liked it, he’d make it. He had the ability to make a few yards of a fabric at a time, too, which was a real advantage; most people wouldn’t make such a small quantity of something special because it’s so expensive. He brought to fruition the fabric of my dreams, and it was a big success. Not long after, he asked me if I had any more designs, and we began to make some textiles together. I used them for my business and he sold them, too.
One day, he brought up the idea of going into business together: he’d run the mill, I’d do the designing, and Carl would sell and handle the business end of things. Carl and I thought it was a good idea, but we were concerned about how we were going to do it. We didn’t have a load of money. We needed to make a living. At the time, Carl was in business with his father.
We decided we would test the market first. In those days, interior designers were mostly staffed professional businesses, not an individual with some helping hands, like it is today. We made a few samples, and Carl made appointments with designers during his lunch hour. The response was positive, so we made more and more samples.
Finally, we had so many samples that we had to put them in a suitcase, but it quickly filled up and became so heavy that Carl couldn’t carry it. So he put wheels on it—he was the first one to do that. If he had patented that roll-along suitcase invention maybe we wouldn’t have had to do anything else for the rest of our lives. But whenever I said that, he always responded, “Don’t worry—think of all the fun we would have missed.”
We had many, many samples because every time Papa did an order, he’d take a piece and give it to me. One day, the suitcase was nearing the brink: bulging with samples, it was almost impossible to close, especially because one of the main fillers was a heavy antique taffeta with satin backing. That’s when I had the idea to make a color blanket. I took all the samples to the mill, laid them out, and graded them, using about twelve inches of each color so they looked harmonious.
One day after months of trying, we finally got an appointment with Dorothy Draper, the doyenne of decorators at the time. The morning of the meeting, as luck would have it, that special blanket sample came in from the mill. Carl threw the blanket on the top of the other fabrics in his suitcase and set off.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Iris Apfel
When Carl was ushered in to meet with Mrs. Draper, a very large woman, she was standing behind an enormous trestle table, which she used as a desk.
She looked at Carl and said, “Well, young man, what have you got to show me?”
He opened the suitcase and with a great, dramatic flourish, threw the sample blanket across the table.
She gasped and said, “Oh my God, you know, this is the first intelligently scaled stripe I have ever seen.”
She thought it was a striped fabric. Well, Carl didn’t have the heart to tell her it wasn’t. She wanted to order three hundred yards.
The next day, we had a visit from Sara Fredericks. She sold beautiful designer clothes in her shops in New York, Boston, and Palm Beach—and she was well known for her impeccable taste and love of luxury. Sara had heard of us through an antiques dealer we both knew and she called to ask if she could come to our apartment after business hours. In the end, she placed an order for 250 yards of another design. We figured if these decorating and fashion mavens thought we were good enough for them, we should give going into business a crack.
We opened Old World Weavers in 1950.
In those days, it was very difficult to get into our part of the fabric business, so we had to be inventive. Eventually our persistence paid off. We began by doing small custom work for clients. We made everything to order because we couldn’t afford to hold any inventory. One job led to another, and things worked out beautifully for the first couple of years. But as labor unions entered fabric production, it became more difficult to do small quantities affordably.
It was time to switch gears.
In 1953, we traveled to Europe to see if we could find special fabrics to replicate. When I want something, I’m relentless, so we went absolutely everywhere. We found brochés, brocades, brocatelles—all kinds of wonderful hand-woven creations. Not only did we look for special fabrics, but we also needed to find the mills that had the ability to replicate them authentically.
A lot of manufacturers we wanted to meet with would literally shut the door in our faces because we weren’t looking for large-enough quantities; what we needed amounted to sample sizes as far as they were concerned. To make matters worse, French war hero Captain Roger E. Brunschwig was already in business with the bulk of the mills in France. But we were persistent, and we finally got our foot in the door. We then tried our luck in Italy, where we had great success.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Iris Apfel
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Iris Apfel
I liked to say our collection of fabrics was the most dazzling one going. Eventually, we began to travel to Europe twice a year, simply because there were fabrics there that we couldn’t get elsewhere.
We specialized in replicating as closely as possible fabrics from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. I never did an adaptation; I always tried to make designs that looked old and different. That’s what led us all over the world: Sometimes we met with museum curators who would open the doors to their collections to help us find what we were looking for. After finding old documents that supported my designs, I would search out the mill that would be able to produce it.
I learned how to spot the right textiles at markets by doing. I don’t think you can learn how to do it from a book. It takes practice, and I believe in apprenticing and honing your eye. It’s hard work and it takes years. It’s like being a good cook who doesn’t work from a recipe but who just knows what ingredients to put in. Anyway, there’s no free lunch. That’s what I learned.
Eventually, we opened a showroom on the top floor of a four-story walkup, a townhouse at 115 East Fifty-Seventh Street in Manhattan, right in the heart of the prime antiques district. Socialites would find out about us and come to the showroom, a space that was styled like a French salon; shortly thereafter, they started sending their decorators our way. We worked with top designers, decorators, and architects with a very prestigious clientele including Greta Garbo, Estée Lauder, Montgomery Clift, Marjorie Merriweather Post, and Joan Rivers, just to mention a few of the boldface names who started coming to our townhouse. We showed samples out of an armoire, but when got bigger, we displayed our wares on racks. That spoiled the salon look, but it also meant that business was booming. I couldn’t argue with that.
Photo Credit: John M. Hall; interior photo courtesy of Iris Apfel
Photo Credit: John M. Hall
Photo Credit: John M. Hall
Photo Credit: John M. Hall; interior photo courtesy of Iris Apfel