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.

Bidding the world farewell in a VA hospital—after observing one last Memorial Day—was entirely fitting. At the start of World War II, he enlisted in the Army, became a photographer for Yank magazine, and often found himself behind the wheel of a jeep, shuttling photojournalists from Life to the front. (I met Slim in the 1990s, when I was Life’s director of photography.) In short order, he would cover heavy combat himself, winning a raft of medals, including a Purple Heart, which he claimed to have given away to “a blonde” whose name he couldn’t recall.

When he returned stateside, however, he was weary of war. And he made a vow. He’d seen enough conflict. Thereafter, he insisted—in a phrase that became his leitmotif—he’d allow himself to photograph only “attractive people who were doing attractive things in attractive places.”

And so he did. Even as war zones continued to beckon his pals from Life (such as Robert Capa, David Douglas Duncan, and Carl Mydans), Slim turned his lens on the playgrounds of Gstaad and Mallorca, Bali and Beverly Hills. With his mischievous smile, blithe spirit, and a knack for self-deprecation, he came across as a little boy lost. His gangly frame helped endear him to his new acquaintances. As a result, he was forever being taken under the wing of the society hostesses, power brokers, and movie stars he photographed. Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, and Alfred Hitchcock became buddies. Hollywood doyenne Jane Howard, herself an accomplished photographer, became a mentor. Inevitably, his new companions, pleased at how flattering they appeared when Slim’s pictures were published, would make introductions for him to their friends: a studio head, a Vanderbilt, the Duchess of Montesquiou-Fezensac. And on it would go…for half a century.

Slim’s subjects were socialites and literary lights, royals and moguls, ingenues and artists—with the occasional gadabout thrown in for good measure. By depicting these well-heeled, well-turned-out men and women in leisure settings (yachts on the Caspian, ski chalets in Verbier) and in their native attire (sundresses, smoking jackets, hunting gear), he transformed his subjects into stealth style icons. Over time, he became renowned for using vibrant color portraiture to convey the casual chic and personal style of the mid-to-late-20th-century ruling class.

Among Slim’s advantages was his own narrative. He passed himself off as a loner, a kind of itinerant, dreamy rascal out of Huckleberry Finn or Our Gang who had been raised as an orphan and was estranged from his extended family. He also came across to those he photographed as being one of them: a sophisticate, a man of the world, and, if pressed, a gentile.

Another plus was his unfussy style. When on assignment, Slim kept his camera gear trim. He worked without strobes or flashes (“I prefer available light,” he said) or photo assistants (he lugged and loaded his own cameras). All he required, he once told me, was to “bring along a beautiful girl Friday, a great-lookin’ researcher—a smasher” who could monopolize his subjects’ attention while Slim, freed from scrutiny, could focus on his photographic prey. Slim liked to arrive early and sometimes stay until martini time, as the setting sun kissed the contours of the scenes around him. His midday photos, as a consequence, can appear airy and bright; his sunset shots, luminous and golden. His streamlined way of working created immediate personal chemistry, letting him establish trust through intimacy while playing to his strong suit as an affable raconteur.

Another of Slim’s specialties was spontaneity. He photographed in a time before stylists and brand managers, before the aristos and arrivistes had a covey of flacks and personal assistants. As a rule, he rendered people in outfits they had conjured up, on the spot, for the shoot. Cabana-casual Bill and Babe Paley in Jamaica. Bahamian vacationers in tennis whites. Poet Gwendolyn Brooks in a white cowl-neck sweater on her Chicago staircase. Viscountess Harriet de Rosiere in a floral print, next to a vase ablaze with color. Bedecked in their own clothes and accessorized by their individual taste or breeding or worldly accomplishments, they were allowed to put their best faces forward, to pose and preen, to express an outward élan. As a consequence, Slim’s subjects were always presented at their finest—at parties or poolside or both; at resorts, in repose, in regalia. “The world recorded by Slim Aarons, thanks to his instantly recognizable body of work,” writes social historian Nick Foulkes in an essay for a new book, Slim Aarons: The Essential Collection, an expansive collection edited by Shawn Waldron and featuring more than 400 photographs, many previously unpublished, “has come down to us in all its sybaritic splendor, shorn of the miseries that infect even the best-lived lives.” The pictures, Foulkes notes, “do not even show the sunburn and mosquito bites. Instead, they present the world of the perennial perfect moment.”

As an added flourish, there was Slim’s fixation on the tiny design elements that would give each frame an extra layer of texture, color, nuance. The throw pillow. The pocket square. The pink-and-white pool float. His eye looked fondly on every jot and tittle that passed his aperture. He also had, I might add, a roving eye. I recall a lunch at his farmhouse in Katonah, for instance, when I watched Slim flirting with my wife. At one point, he stopped to compliment her on the embroidery of her scarf and, in an instant, he sprang from the table, clambered up the stairs, and returned with a gift. It was a cotton neckerchief from 1944; Slim was partial to ascots himself. “I got six of these when the Americans liberated Paris,” he explained, pointing out the red-white-and-blue design, common to both the French and US flags. “You take this one,” he told her. “I always wear mine on planes, which get so drafty with those overhead vents.”

Back in the day, if you were a stodgy titan of industry, you hired Bachrach Studios for your formal black-and-white portrait. But if you were stratospheres above all that, Slim Aarons came to you, cameras in tow, on assignment for a national magazine.

Ingrid Sischy, the art and fashion eminence, once told me that magazines had one attribute that was both a blessing and a curse: their “currency.” Weekly and monthly publications, she explained, uniquely captured contemporary history and styles and trends, but their ultimate value was fleeting, perishable. Indeed, for much of Slim’s career, his photographs were throwaways—in a throwaway medium. His images served as real-time nostalgia, hardly destined for the history books or museum walls. But in 1974 a lone volume of his work, lavishly printed in Milan, was published by Harper & Row. Called A Wonderful Time, its print run was modest and sold some 20,000 copies.

Through the 1970s and ’80s, however, advertising and consumer culture evoked a desire among members of virtually every stratum of society to be able to attain the privileges and trappings of the kind depicted through Slim’s lens: luxury goods, midcentury modern furnishings, smart-caszh wardrobes. Slim’s portraits gave readers not only a glimpse inside the cloistered bastions of the cultivated but also provided a template for a lifestyle to which magazine readers could aspire.

Just before social media took off, in the 1990s and early 2000s—and the taste for good taste and fine design became the rage and then the rule—copies of A Wonderful Time proved to be rare collector’s items, selling online for thousands of dollars. Photographers, art directors, and stylists who hadn’t managed to unearth one could be spotted at Gallagher’s, the vintage magazine store on 12th Street in Manhattan’s East Village, thumbing through dog-eared editions of Holiday, searching for some Slim Aarons “inspiration.” Slim’s photographic prints became coveted. The fashion crowd flocked to his exhibitions. Billionaire Mark Getty, cofounder of the photo agency Getty Images, came calling at the Aarons homestead in Katonah and, for just shy of a cool million, persuaded the photographer—in a single afternoon—to part with his entire archive. In rapid succession, new books were published. A documentary was made. People were beginning to understand: Slim had reduced the essence of a vanishing age into its tincture—a kind of high-life mood board that also informed the aesthetic of the here and now.

Several weeks after Slim’s death, Mary called me. She had just received the strangest email. A woman—a long-lost cousin—was reaching out on behalf of the extended Aarons family, whose members Slim had disavowed years earlier. With Slim gone, she wanted to make contact. Slim, she said—later providing documents and photographs—was not who he professed to be: a free spirit estranged from his parents. In fact, Slim’s father, Susman Aronowicz (a.k.a. Charlie Aarons), had largely distanced himself from the family; his mother, Stella Karvetzky, had been dispatched to a sanitarium. Young Slim, evidently not knowing what had become of either parent, had been raised at different times by an aunt in the tristate area, an orphanage, and with his grandmother and cousins in New Hampshire.

The man who would go on to make his living recording the high WASP look of the second half of the 20th century turned out to have been Jewish, the son of Yiddish-speaking immigrants who had lived in a tenement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Somehow, at some point, Slim had chosen to concoct a more dramatic origin story: the vagabond waif turned bon vivant. He had dazzled acquaintances, courted the high and mighty, and ended up chronicling a world that might have otherwise been lost had it not been for the magnetic pull of his personality, his camera’s forgiving eye, and the singular allure of glossy magazines.

‘Slim Aarons: The Essential Collection’ by Shawn Waldron

Photographs from Slim Aarons: The Essential Collection by Shawn Waldron, published by Abrams, available October 3. Photographs copyright © 2023 Slim Aarons/Getty Images.