Long before we had influencers there was Slim Aarons, the iconic New York photographer who became famous for, in his words, ‘photographing attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places’.
Few can capture the same aspiration that seeps through every inch of a glossy, sun-drenched Slim Aarons print. There’s a natural vintage charm, yet they feel disarmingly modern, despite some from his “golden period” being more than 70 years old. Often colossal in scale, his original prints can reach thousands at auction and grace the suitably grand homes of celebrities and collectors alike.
Born to Jewish immigrant parents in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1916, Slim Aarons (real name George Allen Aarons) began his career as a combat photographer in World War II before turning his back on the “ugliness” of war, saying, ‘I wanted to photograph the people who had the lives worth living’.
And nothing quite expresses Kardashian levels of “my life is more fabulous than yours”-ness than skiing. Specifically, the hedonistic world of après-ski. Through Aarons’ eyes we see a burgeoning clan of wealthy (mostly) Americans in the 1960s and ’70s new to the “do you ski?” lifestyle and dressed to the nines in fur coats and sunglasses.
“Women in colourful hats at an après-ski party in Snowmass Village, near Aspen, March 1968” perfectly captures the mood and fashion of this era, when skiing became mainstream yet aspirational. Two women look nonchalantly down Aarons’ lens, sipping champagne. Clad in lurid green and yellow (alongside a gentleman in fire-engine red), topped with perfectly impractical multi-coloured trilbies, there’s an audacious air to the pair that comes with being young, beautiful and loaded. In the background is a lavish food spread and helicopter, should you need reminding that these are people who are, indeed, living their best lives.
Aarons steadily built an archive of Alpine photography in the ’60s and ’70s, originally published in the likes of Life, Holiday and Town & Country. The crisp, gorgeous mountain scenery of Aspen, Gstaad and Verbier is mere decoration compared to the glamorous subjects in the foreground.
The series is not quite so entrenched in the cultural psyche as his Palm Springs, Hollywood and Riviera snaps that evoke eternal summers, but they equally give us a glimpse into a bygone world of jet-set luxury that we still yearn to be a part of.
Gemma Billington is a London-based writer and editor
