PICTURE PERFECT

A new volume of portraits by photographer Slim Aarons, including never-before-seen work, reanimates a lost world

-  DAVID FRIEND

GEORGE AARONS—EVERYONE CALLED the six-foot-four-inch New Englander “Slim”—had the good fortune to make pictures for magazines from the 1940s to the 1990s. His work filled the glossy showbooks of the day: Life and Holiday, Town & Country and Travel + Leisure, and, on occasion, Vanity Fair. His sunny portraits of postwar affluence captured the habits and habitats of the elite—and of the wider stylish class, whose socialites commingled with bohemians and trendsetters. Decades later, those same images from another era, through their buoyant mood and almost fetishistic attention to detail, have continued to hold sway over today’s influencers in the worlds of fashion, design, and advertising—a group of tastemakers who simply can’t get enough of Aarons’s idealized depictions of the good life.

The last time I saw Slim was Memorial Day weekend 2006. He was at a VA hospital not far from his home in Katonah, New York. Eighty-nine and failing, he was dozing in a corridor when his daughter, Mary, and I came to visit. He was sitting upright, nattily attired in a navy blue fisherman’s cardigan. He squeezed our hands, but that was the extent of our communication. After several strokes, he had largely shut down.

Though his face was wizened, Slim seemed impish. He still had the apple cheeks that harkened back to his days as a “simple New Hampshire farm boy,” as he liked to say. That afternoon, a brass band played on the patio. Wheeled out for the festivities, Slim rat-a-tapped his toes to the beat. The next day, Slim passed away peacefully.