Aerin Lauder captures her Palm Beach then and now
Aerin Lauder’s Palm Beach is all about bright colors, warm breezes and good living, and that’s exactly what you’ll find in her new coffee-table book, aptly named “Palm Beach” and sporting a lipstick-pink cloth hardcover.
Lauder was born into a world of beauty and style, the granddaughter of cosmetics mogul Estée Lauder, who bought vacation homes in Palm Beach, Fla., that her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren still use.
“(The book has) a lot of personal memories because I started going there as a very little girl,” said Lauder, who was in Houston last week to sign copies of the book at the Longoria Collection in Uptown Park. “I would be so excited about going there that I would stay up all night. The warm air, sea breeze and fresh orange juice was the feeling of total paradise. I still feel that way when I get off the plane; it feels so good.”
“Palm Beach” is a luscious picture book for the self indulgent — or for those who wish they were — page after page of perfect scenery, well-dressed people and just enough nostalgia to remind you that though the city’s history is short, not everything about the place is brand new.
Long a place for the rich to party and recover, Palm Beach’s history includes Kennedys, Dodges, Pulitzers, Trumps and Vanderbilts, plus more infamous names such as Madoff and Helmsley, and they appear in the book on one page or another. There’s a shot of thenmarried Prince Charles and Princess Diana at a polo match, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (the former Prince Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson) in a relaxed moment, Jackie and John F. Kennedy leaving church with Caroline and John-John.
It’s a good mix of then and now, with some of the book devoted to Lauder family memories. Estée Lauder was 97 when she died in 2004, but she’s forever young in photos such as the 1972 portrait of her ready for a dinner party, posed in front of a gorgeous chinoiserie mural, or another with her immediate family — her husband, two sons and their families, including Aerin.
Aerin Lauder now has her own company, the luxury-lifestyle brand AERIN — with cosmetics, perfume, fashion and home-décor collections — and she’s still the style and image director of Estée Lauder, where she started working when she was in high school. That first job was at Clinique, and she has worked with different Lauder brands in advertising, marketing and product development.
Lauder dipped into her family archives for some of the photos in the book, and editors at her publisher, Assouline, found more to represent the beautiful scenery, history and celebrity. Photos capture the coastline and its white, sandy beaches, with yachts drifting through turquoise waters and against cerulean blue skies. Every lawn looks as well taken care of as a golf-course fairway.
“I go down (to Palm Beach) all the time,” said the 49-yearold New Yorker. “I’m going in a couple of weeks for a book signing, and we go for the holidays, spring break. … I celebrated my birthday there. It’s an important part of my life.”
Though she was dressed in head-to-toe black for our interview, she said her Florida wardrobe is dramatically different.
“When I’m someplace tropical — like Palm Beach in the summer — color is magical and can transform your mood and how a room looks,” she said. “My palette in Palm Beach is different from my palette in New York. In Florida, it’s pink and blue and yellow — not one piece of black clothing and not even a black bathing suit.”
“There’s a quote in the front of the book that sums up life in Palm Beach,” she said of a quote by Cecil Beaton, who wrote about the city in a 1937 issue of Vogue. “It’s something like, ‘tennis, swimming, lunch, golf, drinks, dinner, go to bed and get up and do it all over again.’ ”
“The warm air, sea breeze and fresh orange juice was the feeling of total paradise. I still feel that way when I get off the plane; it feels so good.”
Aerin Lauder, author of “Palm Beach”