Ilana Royce Smithkin, who as an orange-haired nonagenarian with matching two-inch eyelashes caught fire in the world of fashion — a muse for photographers, filmmakers and entertainers — died August 1 at her home in Provincetown, MA. She was 101. In her obituary in The New York Times, Alex Traub described her as “a joyous persona that took a lifetime to build after a grim childhood” in Nazi Germany.

In 2010, the photographer Ari Seth Cohen heard from a friend about a “magical woman with fiery red hair and the longest eyelashes anyone had ever seen.” Soon after, he spotted a woman in the street in the West Village, who was about 4 feet 9 inches tall and wore hand-painted sneakers, matching baby blue clothes and diamond-studded sunglasses, with eyelashes poking out.  Mr. Cohen asked to take Ms. Smithkin’s photograph. She exclaimed, “Of course,” and kicked a leg in the air. “I instantly fell in love,” Mr. Cohen said.

Ms. Smithkin painted and made a living as a milliner, a factory worker, a painter of glass lantern shades, and a movie theater usher. In the 1960s and ‘70s, she began teaching art classes in Kentucky and South Carolina, traveling to small towns and using church basements and funeral parlors as classrooms.

In interviews, Ms. Smithkin referred to having a revelation and finally becoming her authentic self around the age of 80, roughly the same time she started performing songs by Marlene Dietrich and Edith Piaf. She would wear stilettos, stockings, and a revealing dress, and until she had hip surgery in her mid-80s, she finished every show by doing a split.