Slim Aarons – Decoding Desire

PR: What are those behaviours? Online, you’ve spoken about time as a commodity and how the ultimate extravagance is to be wasteful with it.
EH: We’ve always had a leisure class and time has always been a key part of that. There was an interesting trend in the 2010s with the founder era start-ups, where even if you were a wealthy person, you wanted to be seen as a hustler. That was what that millennial era was all about: the idea that you could be highly optimised with your time and spend every single moment of the day from 5:00 AM through to 11:00 PM like, sticking your face in ice water or something. Now, we want rich people to look rich again. Free time has become the ultimate status symbol. It goes back to the Italian idea, “il dolce far niente” (the sweetness of doing nothing) or, for Indonesians, “nongkrong” (the act of hanging out or casually socialising with friends). It’s the ability to really sit and be completely unstructured with your time. Another example is sleep. How much sleep are you getting? What quality of sleep are you getting? The OURA ring has absolutely exploded this year. The new domain of self-optimisation is to know how well you are doing in the eight hours that you’re not awake, as well as the hours that you are. You can see that a lot of luxury brands are starting to do sleepwear collections too. Privacy is also increasingly a status symbol. To what extent can I be offline, but still be present everywhere? Can I still attend the right parties, at the right restaurants, but at the same time, live my life distinctly low tech and low social media? Can I not depend on AI? To be consciously plugged out from all that is more and more desirable. A sense of luxury comes from owning your own data – and your own life. Again, a lot of these status symbols existed before, but they are coming into increasing prominence now because of economic circumstances.

PR: Building on the idea of time as a luxury, Slim Aarons’ photographs offer a striking visual narrative of leisure as status, from poolside lounging to lavish social scenes. Why do you think this vision of effortless leisure continues to resonate today?
EH: Aarons’ work represents a dual ideal. On the one hand, it represents this kind of retro glamour and very evocative, voyeuristic glimpse of the good life. The photographs come from a period in time that our society is incredibly nostalgic for – for Western economies particularly, that period of post-war affluence was as good as it got. Then, there’s the fact that these photographs also come from a pre-image culture time, pre-social media. There’s a sense of real spontaneity about them, and they seem to be devoid of the thing that all images in our current era seem to have, which is performativity. Every photo, every video that we look at now seems to be subordinated to the goal of the picture. It’s all about how the picture feeds into the personal brand or the personal narrative that’s being created by the image. As a result, the image almost ceases to exist in the modern era. Additionally, wealthy people today are not like the wealthy people in Aarons’ photographs. Despite unprecedented wealth, they too grew up in front of cameras, performing like the rest of us. They’re caught in the same trap that we are caught in. That’s why Aarons’ spontaneity feels even more alluring today than 50 years ago.

PR: Aarons often photographed glamorous women from wealthy or famous backgrounds. You’ve talked about how ideas of being a woman have changed over time, especially in media and branding. What kind of image of women is being promoted and sold today?

EH: In the past few years, there has been a real diversification and also a queering of the kind of woman represented in mainstream media. One example is Céline Sciamma whose films define women’s relationships in the absence of men. The Barbie movie is also an interesting example, as it confronted the impossibility of being a woman in the modern era and what it means to be seen as a sex object. It exposed how brands co-opt the way that a woman is represented in society and how feminism is packaged and sold to women, as well as to men. Now, thanks to that — and to social media – there’s a more meta-awareness of female representation in the media. In the past, the idea of what a woman is or should be was created in great part by a centralised marketing industry that was dominated by a small number of voices – primarily straight, white, older males. Now, thanks to things like social media and the projects that I mentioned, everything has gotten more decentralised. There are many more ways to be a woman than ten years ago.

PR: What do you foresee as the next major trend that will shape consumer behaviour? Are there specific unmet needs or gaps in the market that you believe present the greatest opportunity for innovation?

EH: We face a real engagement recession on social media right now. Nobody’s posting anymore; some even calling it a posting ennui. We’re not tuning in in the same way anymore and increasingly users are going further into hiding. That’s a problem for brands that advertise on the internet. I’ve gone on record saying users are starting to retreat into closed networks, into WhatsApp groups, into chat groups, et cetera, so brands will follow suit. The challenge is that on the public internet, brands are rewarded for the same type of brand building they’ve always done, which is about creating spectacle, but when you enter a closed network, like a DM or a chat group, you don’t have a right to be there – not implicitly anyway. If you brand build the same way that you’ve always done, you’re just gonna scare the user off again. People are tired of that performance and that spectacle. So, brands have to learn what I call introverted brand building, which is to build without making themselves the centre of attention. That’s where the opportunity lies: for brands to understand how to be more intimate in the way that they engage with their consumers.

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