The Rules of Attraction

A new book of photographs by the legendary Slim Aarons documents his most stylish captures

- By Jared Paul Stern. Photography by Slim Aarons

Asked to define his work during his most prolific period, the late, great Slim Aarons (1916–2006) unhesitatingly declared: “Attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places.” So well and so distinctively did he document them, the sheer ripple effect of his influence is hard to calculate, even 15 years after his death. Aarons, who was born in the Hudson River Valley and got his start as a war photographer before finding his true milieu in Hollywood in the 1950s, was unrivaled in focusing solely on his idealized subject matter, to the exclusion of all else.

As interior design guru Jonathan Adler notes in his foreword to Slim Aarons: Style, recently published by Abrams and one of the most striking anthologies of Aarons’ work to date, “In Slim’s world, the dramatis personae are never to be found staring at the horizon with existential terror. They are, in sharp contrast, frozen during moments of heavenly becaftaned, unapologetic self-indulgence.” As for his influence, Adler declares, Aaron’s impossibly beautiful photographs were nothing less than “the big bang of FOMO that made Instagram possible.”