EVALUATION 101
Image Credit: Bryan Adams
I don’t happen to like pretty. Most of the world is not with me, but I don’t care.
Iris Apfel (1921—) is a self-described “geriatric starlet” with a flair for fashion, design, and combining what’s cheap with what’s chic. She dresses herself like a painting. Apfel’s creative endeavors have ranged from her career as a textile designer to working as an interior designer for the White House and producing her own jewelry and clothing lines.
Apfel was an under-the-radar style force until the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York dedicated a show at the Costume Institute to Apfel's collection of clothing and jewelry in 2005.
In 2005, she was the first living person who was not a designer to have her clothing and accessories exhibited at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a blockbuster show that catapulted her to fame and a career as a supermodel, muse, and collaborator for renowned brands, from Citroen to Tag Heuer, and global gigs at Bon Marché in Paris and the Landmark Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong. Her authenticity, wit, candor, and infectious energy have earned her nearly a million followers on social media. She is entertaining, thought-provoking, visually arresting, and inspiring.
Style icon Iris Apfel and former New York City Ballet member and dance photographer, Steven Caras for this special presentation from the Kravis Center’s 2015-2016 ArtSmart Lunch & Learn series. In this intimate talk, you’ll gain insight into the life and career of Apfel and her colorful road to success. Excerpts from the documentary made about her, titled IRIS, will be viewed and discussed.
EVALUATION 101
Evaluation is about discernment, good judgment, selection, self-improvement.
Competition focuses our attention on others when it should be on ourselves. It can be fatal to true accomplishment. Most professional athletes refer to beating their “personal best” as more gratifying than beating others. Competition is merely a heightened form of practice. It is an opportunity for them to hone their skills with the added benefit of increased pressure.
Competition is about trends. Evaluation is about discernment, good judgment, selection, self-improvement. Competition is about quantity. Evaluation is about quality. Quality leads to quantity. Winning, therefore, is a byproduct of learning at our work well.
If we over-index on competition, we become more reactive and less responsive. We rush to judgment and act rashly. We imitate instead of originate. Asking, “What can we do to serve?” instead of “What does it take to win?” positions us well for the long game. Here, we learn to nurture new ideas and speculate about possibilities.
The idea of healthy competition is a fundamental aspect of business. Teams are organized and individuals are evaluated based on this premise. But evaluation asks us to look at our competitions and judge how we can better serve our market. Our ability to evaluate allows us to take in the reality of our place in the market while holding true to our vision for ourselves, our services, and our products. We need competition to learn how to be ourselves better and more authentically.
When we focus too much on others, when we resent and critique them, we lose sight of our own red threads. The desire to be better than chokes off the desire to simply be. We ask ourselves the wrong questions and arrive at the wrong conclusions.
Simply put, the argument is for the winning power of the horizonal view: “Is what I’m doing today taking me where I’d like to go in the future?”
How do we learn to evaluate instead of compete?
PRACTICE
Take a blank sheet of paper. Number one to fifty (yes, just do it). Reflect on your life story—with all its peaks and valleys.
Moving through your life in five-year increments, list fifty things you are personally proud of.
COMMIT
[ ] I commit myself to evaluate myself against a personal vision of success, my personal best, or my self-designated standard.
FURTHER READING/ WATCHING
Rare Bird of Fashion: The Irreverent Iris Apfel: Captures the unique style of fashion maverick Iris Apfel and her exuberantly idiosyncratic personal chic. With remarkable panache and discernment, Iris Apfel combines styles, colors, textures, and patterns without regard to period, provenance, or aesthetic conventions. Over ninety color plates, photographed by Eric Boman, show off a selection of Apfel's outfits on posed mannequins, some sporting her trademark outsized spectacles. The originality of her style is typically revealed in her mixing of haute couture with flea-market finds.
Iris Apfel: Accidental Icon: Personal style really originated with Iris Apfel; she has always espoused the virtues of not just dressing for yourself, but being who you are and doing it unapologetically, which is perhaps why she and her messaging and aesthetic have resonated so comprehensively. A unique and lavishly illustrated collection of musings, anecdotes, and observations on all matters of life and style, infused with the singular candor, wit, and exuberance of the globally revered ninety-six-year-old fashion icon whose work has been celebrated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute and by countless fans worldwide. All are paired with a bold, color-filled, exciting design of never-before-published personal photographs and mementos, mixed with images from top international fashion photographers and illustrators.
Iris pairs legendary 87-year-old documentarian Albert Maysles with Iris Apfel, the quick-witted, flamboyantly dressed 93-year-old style maven who has had an outsized presence on the New York fashion scene for decades. More than a fashion film, the documentary is a story about creativity and how, even in Iris' dotage, a soaring free spirit continues to inspire. IRIS portrays a singular woman whose enthusiasm for fashion, art and people are life's sustenance and reminds us that dressing, and indeed life, is nothing but an experiment. Despite the abundance of glamour in her current life, she continues to embrace the values and work ethic established during a middle-class Queens upbringing during the Great Depression. "I feel lucky to be working. If you're lucky enough to do something you love, everything else follows."
In her words…
“I never felt pretty, I don’t feel pretty now; I’m not a pretty person. I don’t like pretty, so I don’t feel badly. And I think it worked out well, because… when you’re somebody like myself, in order to get around and be attractive, you have to develop something, you have to learn something, and have to do something, so you become a bit more interesting. And when you get older, you get by on that. Anyway, I don’t happen to like pretty. Most of the world is not with me, but I don’t care."—documentary Iris
“I always like to do things as if I’m playing jazz; try this, try that,” Iris said. “With me, it’s not intellectual. It’s all gut … It’s totally, totally the involvement and the process. It’s the process I like much better even than wearing it … People interview me and they keep asking if I have any rules. And I say, I don’t have any rules because I would only be breaking them, so it’s a waste of time.” — Town & Country
"There is really no substitute for experience. You must have experience and be open to experience — that helps. That helps a lot. Most importantly, you have to be yourself, be who you are and take time to be open and honest with yourself. That is what it's all about. If you don't know yourself, you'll never have great style. You'll never really live. To me, the worst fashion faux pas is to look in the mirror, and not see yourself."— Let's Do More
“You can’t just say, “I’m gonna have style.” You have to work at it. It’s intuitive; some people have it, and some people can work on it all day long, and it will never happen.” —Interview Magazine
“…it’s trial and error. You have to try different [things] and see what works. You have to invest a little bit in it. If that’s all too much for you, and it doesn’t make you comfortable, then I think you should forget the whole thing. I think it’s better to be happy and comfortable than well dressed.” —Interview Magazine
“Color can raise the dead.” — News Review
“You can’t do everything. Something has to give. And sometimes it’s you.” — News Review
“Life is grey and dull, you might as well have a little fun with how you dress.”—Attitude and Style: a Conversations with Iris Apfel
“If you’re going to sit there and do the same damn thing all the time, you might as well jump into the box.” — HSN Home Shopping Network via Attitude and Style: a Conversations with Iris Apfel
“What’s my style is not your style, and I don’t see how you can define it. It’s something that expresses who you are in your own way.” — One Kings Lane
"I'm a hopeless romantic. I buy things because I fall in love with them. I never buy anything just because it's valuable. My husband used to say I took a piece of fabric and listen to the threads. It tells me a story... I have to get a physical reaction when I buy something. A coup de foudre — a bolt of lightning. It's fun to get knocked out that way!" —documentary Iris
"I am inspired by everything around me. It's not like I stand out on the moors or any of that romantic crap they throw around. I'm just inspired by being alive and breathing and meeting people and talking to people and doing things and absorbing what's happening. I think if more people did that, there would be better fashion. " —documentary Iris
"To find out who you are is like putting yourself on a psychiatric couch, but you have nobody to help you. Really it isn’t easy. I was talking with my nephew this morning and he gave me one of the best quotes I’ve heard in years, ‘Personal style is curiosity about oneself.'"—lecture in the The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2012
What we don’t see on the resumes we review or the job descriptions we want is the litany of emotional entanglements we bring to our roles, uninvited, to the team and organizations we work in. Alongside technical skills, people who can master a range of subjective skills are better able to influence, deal with ambiguity, bounce back from setbacks, think creatively, and manage themselves in the presence of setbacks. In short, those who learn lead.
Observing subjective qualities in others past and present gives us a mental picture for the behaviors we want to practice. Each figure illustrates a quality researched from The Look to Craftsmen Project. When practiced as part of our day-to-day, these qualities will help us develop our mastery in our lives and work.