Slim Aarons whose photographs remain the definitive ode to a bygone jet set, was big on “mise en place,”according to his daughter, Mary Aarons. His rule of thumb was that the “entire setting should tell the story of the place or person.”
And among those settings? A plethora of photos set amongst the planet’s most fabulous winter backdrops. Though lesser known perhaps than some of Aarons’ most enduring photos — like Poolside Glamour of two socialites chatting in Palm Springs, or Kings of Hollywood of Clark Gable laughing with friends in black tie in Beverly Hills — the snow-speckled photos continue to cast an allure unto themselves. Mary Aarons, the keeper of her father’s legacy, generally favors “the landscapes,” as she calls them.
In that respect, her father covered the gamut, his many “ski-lift” tableaux from Gstaad to Aspen acting as a foil to the “beautiful boats… the beach umbrellas”that he also tirelessly chronicled in the Côte d’Azur.
What united the photos, both hot and cold? “They were,”his daughter muses now, “photos of happy times.”Aarons’ snow photos, one could argue, did as much as anyone ever has to make skiing glamorous.
He “extracted everything that was cool and chic”about old money in the 1960s and 1970s, is how style-watcher Simon Doonan describes Aarons’ work for magazines like Life and Holiday back in the day, then amplified further in Aarons’ now classic books of photography, such as Slim Aarons: Once Upon A Time. Doonan went on: “He left behind the dusty mumsiness of it and made it look incredibly crisp.”
Slim Aarons’ mountain photographs, in particular, offer nothing but charm and nostalgia and, yes, crispness. The pants were tight, the poles were straight, and the sweaters were bright. In Aarons’ world of après-ski, the champagne flows ever freely and the frisson of fun is never far.
Among the most famous of these pictures is one he took of William F. Buckley, a godfather of conservatism, getting jolly with John Kenneth Galbraith, a celebrated economist who held a similar command in liberal circles. The photo reveals them laughing in Gstaad. If nothing else, the image shows that skiing was to bring these two disparate men together.
