I saw Anna Wintour last week at a film premiere. She was - no surprise - at the center of everything. The launch party itself was a study in excess: a crush of drag queens, celebrities, models, and media personalities. All in full regalia, orbiting brand activations from Tweezerman to Belvedere. It wasn’t an easy room to stand out in. Yet somehow, Anna did.

The premiere was for The Devil Wears Prada 2, with Meryl Streep reprising her role as the formidable fashion editrix Miranda Priestly. Anna is often cited as the character’s real-life analogue. She famously inspired the original novel, written by her former assistant Lauren Weisberger. And yet, Meryl Streep has gone on the record to say her performance drew less from Anna than from a composite of Mike Nichols and Clint Eastwood.

Anna had little to do with the film itself. She neither wrote nor directed it, had no hand in the costumes, and didn’t even make a cameo (unlike the many fashion luminaries who did, from Marc Jacobs to Donatella Versace to Naomi Campbell). And yet, her presence at the premiere still loomed large.

It obviously wasn’t a function of her contributions to the film. Nor really about her impact on fashion or even on Vogue. The reality is she inherited an institution shaped by her predecessor Grace Mirabella, who propelled the magazine commercially, and, before her, Diana Vreeland, who transformed it into a global cultural force. Anna’s power stems from a different kind of authority altogether.

My observations of Anna and her outsized position led me to question the nature of influence itself. Who really holds power in creative industries? Is it the people who make things, or the ones who decide what things matter?

On reflection, I see Anna - alongside other luminaries like designer Tom Ford, merchant Dawn Mello, record producer Clive Davis, and media mogul David Geffen - as amassing power through a mastery of curation. They belong to the class that decides what matters.

I thought about this class of curators while recording my latest SiriusXM show. What began as a diatribe on the dehumanizing realities of modern global travel - its frictions and indignities - gave way to a curiosity about the individual who once set the gold standard for luxury travel: César Ritz.

If Anna Wintour is one of the most compelling contemporary examples of an aesthetic curator, César Ritz was one of the first. By codifying the rituals, standards, and aspirations of the ultra-wealthy traveler in the nineteenth century, he didn’t just transform luxury hospitality; he constructed an entire language of luxury.

In my own work with The Ritz-Carlton, I saw what happens when that language breaks down. My goal was to partner with the company’s general managers to understand luxury services not as a checklist of processes, but as a system of aesthetic signals and emotional cues. At its highest level, luxury isn’t imposed, but observed, refined, and delivered with excellence and consistency.

Curating the Luxury Experience

César Ritz was not born into luxury. The son of a farmer, he was raised in a small Swiss village in the mid-1800s. By most accounts, he showed little early promise and was dismissed from his first hotel apprenticeship, told he would never succeed in the industry.

Likewise, Anna Wintour’s ascent in fashion was not smooth or linear. Early in her career in London at Harper’s & Queen, she developed a reputation for being difficult. And, in the 1970s, just a few months after moving to New York to work at Harper’s Bazaar, she was reportedly fired for clashing with the editorial team’s more traditional, commercial direction.

But both she and César persisted. Over the course of the next few decades, he shadowed his well heeled clients through the grand hotels of Europe, from Paris to Vienna to Monte Carlo to the Riviera, studying not just how the finest hotels looked, but how they operated and how they felt to those who passed through.

In time, he came to understand the rhythms of aristocratic life and how to design experiences that not only met his guests’ expectations, but anticipated them. In the process, he built a reputation not just for world-class service, but for creating environments that felt both effortless and exacting.

By the time César Ritz was ready to open his own hotel - the Ritz Paris in 1898- he didn’t need to invent a new concept of luxury; he simply codified his years of experience serving aristocracy, translating it into something marketable, repeatable, and enduring.

The Curator Archetype

Before César Ritz, many others managed Europe’s grand establishments. Antoine-Charles Aubert, for example, was highly respected for his hotel designs, and Georges Auguste Escoffier was renowned for his cuisine. But none mastered the art of curating a hotel in a way that could endure beyond its time and place.

César Ritz understood what curation actually means.

Its roots lie in the idea of “cure” or to restore. To curate is not merely to select or refine; it is to bring an experience into harmony, to orchestrate its elements so they feel seamless, intentional, and complete.

He did not just run hotels; he choreographed them. He considered how guests arrived, how they were greeted, how light entered a room, how a table was set, how service was delivered, and how privacy and attention were balanced. He introduced rituals where they elevated meaning and eliminated friction where it caused unease. He aligned cuisine with setting, service with atmosphere, and staff with a standard of discretion and precision. In doing so, he transformed hospitality from a checklist of services into a coherent, luxurious experience.

The Intelligence of Editing

It’s easy to mistake César’s gifts for other forms of discipline. But his required a particular kind of intelligence - one not built on creation or innovation, but on selection and sequencing: knowing what to keep, what to refine, and what to remove.

This is the intelligence of editing. It begins with discernment. César did not need to invent luxury; it already existed in the private rituals of aristocratic life. What he understood was how to distill it.

Editing, in this sense, is an act of restraint. It requires the confidence to exclude as much as to include. It is also an intelligence of sequencing. César understood that experience unfolds over time. The guest should never feel the seams; what appears effortless is, in fact, highly composed. In this way, editing becomes a form of authorship.

This kind of intelligence is rarely named, and even more rarely taught. Yet it can be developed. In a future masterclass, I’ll explore the art of curation more directly as one of the four essential steps in cultivating Aesthetic Intelligence.

The Nature of the Curator

Behind all of this, there is a broader way of thinking about what I am calling “the Cult of the Curator.”

In my view, taste is not random. It follows patterns - ones that, over time, crystallize into a set of distinct aesthetic archetypes. Each is shaped by a number of underlying forces that govern how we see, select, and refine the world around us. (I’ll explore this framework more fully in my next book.)

Most people operate within these forces unconsciously. But certain individuals - like César Ritz and Anna Wintour - arrive at them with unusual clarity and consistency.

The Curator is one such archetype: defined by a bias toward control, a gift for editing rather than inventing, and a heightened sensitivity to detail.

Same Archetype, Different Mediums

What makes the Curator Archetype so powerful is that its influence extends well beyond any single field.

• You see it in Ralph Lauren, who built an empire not on new ideas, but on the careful curation of existing ones, translated into a complete lifestyle.

• You see it in restaurateurs like Danny Meyer (Union Square Hospitality) and Keith McNally (Balthazar, Pastis), whose power lies in choreographing every element of the experience - from menus and lighting to uniforms and acoustics.

• You see it in record producer Rick Rubin, a master of reduction, who’s known for helping artists edit down and rediscover what matters most in their work.

• And you see it in my former LVMH boss, Bernard Arnault, who has assembled a constellation of houses - each distinct, yet orchestrated within a larger system of taste and perception.

For each of these figures, their power lies in their tasteful composition. The orchestration of people, products, and ideas into systems of meaning that others recognize, adopt, and aspire to.

Where does your power lie?

Last week’s case study on the devolution of car design showed what happens when taste is lost and when everything begins to look the same. This week focuses on the individuals gifted at restoring distinction and meaning. Next week, I’ll build on this idea in more practical terms: how taste is applied to storytelling, and how the same instincts that shape taste can be used to craft a narrative and ultimately turn a brand into something more enduring: a myth.

I hope you’ll join me in the classroom.

Cheers, Pauline

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A Tesla, a Toyota, a Hyundai, a Mercedes.

Four different brands. Four different price points. Four different countries of origin. Yet, they all collapse into the same design. A glossy, grayscale jelly bean.

I remember the first time I fell in love with a car on the road. It was a buttery-yellow AMC Pacer, circa 1976. It had a strange, swollen shape - more glass than metal - and looked like a fishbowl on wheels. It dared to look different, and for that alone, I loved it.

About 20 years later, I fell in love again. This time with a British Racing Green Mazda Miata. Its headlights popped up like blinking eyes, and the whole car seemed to smile. I was charmed by its sweetness.

But it’s not just cars. That flattening of personality and loss of distinction seems to have seeped into everything.

Look at today’s beauty devices. Kitchen appliances. Even logos and apps. They all converge on the same aesthetic language: soft edges, rounded corners, muted neutrals, matte finishes, minimal lines. Designed to disappear.

It’s something I spoke about on my latest SiriusXM show, though strictly through the lens of the auto industry. I traced the sector across nine distinct eras - from Ford’s Model T to today’s Tesla - showing how each era captured the spirit of its time. And how that spirit has since been flattened into… well, a glossy, grayscale jelly bean.

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Aesthetic Trends Are Not Born in a Vacuum

Many people think of design as industry-specific. Fashion designers make dresses. Furniture designers make chairs. Automotive designers make cars.

But design doesn’t evolve in silos. It cuts across categories, as designers, working independently, are still influenced by the same socio-cultural forces, the same technological shifts, the same underlying consumer sentiments, and the same evolving sense of what looks and feels “good.”

The auto industry is an especially interesting sector to study. Cars are among the most visible, most expensive, and most culturally loaded products people buy. They sit at the intersection of innovation, identity, and everyday life. So when their designs change, it’s never just about functionality or economy. It’s a reflection of something much broader. The zeitgeist.

The Aesthetics of Optimism

Take the 1950s. It was a culture of progress. The jet age. The space race. America, in particular, felt alive with possibilities.

Cadillac was the defining car brand of that era. Its exaggerated tail fins made its cars look as if they were about to take flight.

Compare the Cadillac to other iconic designs of the time - like the Eames chair, Sunbeam toaster, and classic American diner. Their lines were all hard but expressive. Their materials shimmered. And their bright colors and bold features projected an unapologetic confidence.

Design in America was infused with optimism.

The Aesthetics of Constraint

By the 1970s, the tone had shifted. The exuberance of the 1950s had drained away. It was an era of oil shocks, inflation, and environmental awakening. Confidence gave way to concern, and design grew smaller, more restrained, more utilitarian.

Cars followed suit. They became smaller, boxier, more subdued. Compare them to the heavy concrete of brutalist buildings, or to the earth-toned palettes of wardrobes and interior spaces.

In an effort to appear relaxed, everything just felt awkward, even anxious.

The Onset of the Jelly Bean

By the 1990s, something else started to happen. Hard edges softened. Cars took on more rounded forms. It was the start of the so-called “jelly bean” era. Think of the Ford Taurus or the Volkswagen New Beetle.

At the same time, consumer electronics were undergoing a parallel shift. Technology was made to feel inviting, not intimidating. Early personal tech products, like the iMac G3 and Motorola pagers, were made in translucent colors and with friendly curves that erased the hard lines and visible wiring of earlier machines. Across categories, objects became smoother, more approachable, less machine-like.

The Deadening Effects of Optimization

Fast forward to today, and we arrive at, well, the blob.

Tesla Model 3. The iPhone. Sonos speakers. Dyson fans. A.I. startup logos. The interiors of a typical Airbnb. They all share a certain something that reads as nothing. Minimal detailing, smooth surfaces, disappearing color palettes, an absence of visual noise. An absence of personality.

Even luxury brands have moved in this direction. The message is no longer about design. It’s about control. We have, in effect, optimized aesthetics.

This is what I see as blobification. It’s not a stylistic choice, but the byproduct of groupthink, digital proliferation, and commercial prioritization.

Sharpness introduces risk, so edges soften. Airflow enhances efficiency and manufacturability, so surfaces smooth out. Neutrality travels better across cultures and markets, so color disappears.

Over time, all objects lose whatever tension or specificity once made them distinct and interesting. And eventually, they turn into an aesthetic blob, shaped by the cumulative effect of systematized decision-making.

This shift hasn’t just reshaped how things look; it’s reshaped the economics behind them. More standardized, optimized designs are easier to engineer, manufacture, and scale across global platforms. On the one hand, this has driven down costs. On the other, as designs converge, individual models become harder to distinguish. The focus shifts away from the more emotive aspects of brand DNA toward technical considerations like features, functions, and financing. In that sense, cars increasingly behave like commodities, and their perceived value and pricing power are eroding.

The Age of Aesthetic Convergence.

But again, it’s not just happening with cars.

Walk into a newly built apartment building and you’ll likely find the same light wood floors, white walls, and matte black fixtures. Open Instagram and scroll past brand after brand using the same muted tones and sans-serif typography. Look at airports, hotels, offices: they’re increasingly interchangeable. It’s as if they were all designed by the same invisible hand.

There’s a tension at the center of all this. Historically, design wasn’t just about solving problems; it was about expressing identity.

Cars, in particular, used to carry meaning. They reflected personal taste and values. A muscle car didn’t just perform; it provoked.

Cars also used to signal national character. A German BMW or Volkswagen conveyed something entirely different from an Italian Ferrari or Fiat, or an American Ford or Chrysler.

Today, that signaling has flattened. Cars still differ in performance and price. But visually, they communicate largely the same thing: competence. They convey that their products are safe, efficient, well-engineered. All of which matter. But none of which make you fall in love.

The Rebirth of Romance

But if product design has always reflected the forces shaping it, this phase is no exception. Looking back, periods of constraint have always been followed by bursts of creativity and expression.

It’s no surprise, then, that the appetite for sameness is already beginning to dissipate. People today don’t just want products, brands, and spaces that work; they want them to mean something, to elicit feeling. The more everything looks the same, the more we crave difference.

If this era has been defined by optimization, I believe the next will be defined by character, soul, and a distinctly human touch. A return to objects that don’t just perform, but captivate, surprise, and delight.

I’ll pick this up next week with a two-part series on the aesthetics of global travel. First, a case study on the devolution of the modern travel experience: how standardization, cost optimization, and global scale have stripped it of joy and wonder. Then, a return to origins: a profile of the world’s first aesthetic genius in hospitality, and how he set the gold standard for luxury and built an empire that still defines the category today. Until then, stay tuned and attuned!

Cheers, Pauline

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In our last MasterClass, we explored a simple but powerful idea: your aesthetic preferences are not arbitrary; they are, in part, evolutionary. Shaped by biological, ecological, and genetic forces, they influence what you perceive as “good,” appealing, and desirable. At their core, these preferences function as mechanisms for survival and flourishing.

Today, we build on that foundation by examining how culture and society refine, reinforce, elevate - or distort - those instincts.

Your taste does not emerge in a vacuum. It is shaped by the world around you: when you came of age, where you’ve lived, the language you speak, the rituals you practice. Each of these layers contributes to the lens through which you see and judge the world.

To sharpen your taste, you must first understand not just what you like, but also why you like it and who and what have influenced you along the way.

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In our last MasterClass, I explored the impact of AI on Aesthetic Intelligence. Specifically, I asked whether artificial intelligence is actually intelligent? And, more importantly, how can we all leverage the benefits of technology, while still maintaining a distinct and sustainable human advantage?

Today, I want to turn that lens inward and pose a more personal and revealing question:

Where does taste come from? Why are we each drawn to certain images, objects, people, brands or ideas, while others leave us cold?

Our aesthetic tastes are the most intimate and authentic expressions of who we are, and they are shaped by a confluence of external forces. In this MasterClass, we will begin to uncover those forces. Not in the abstract, but at their source: the biological, ecological, and genetic foundations that shape what we each perceive as “good,” appealing, and desirable.

This is the first of a two-part inquiry. We begin with evolutionary aesthetics: how certain preferences were developed as mechanisms for survival and flourishing.

In the following session, we’ll explore how culture and society refine, reinforce, and elevate - or distort - those instinctive preferences.

If you want to sharpen your taste, you must first understand where it comes from. And as you’ll see, it’s less random - and more patterned - than you may have expected.

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When I was nine, I loved playing with Barbie dolls. I admired their perfectly proportioned noses, their glassy, pore-less complexions, and their impossibly long legs. My favorite one had red hair, which made her slightly more relatable than her blonde counterparts. She was the version of me I hoped to become. It didn’t matter that I’d never have an 16-inch waist.

Years later, in high school, I remember noticing the mother of a classmate. She was a woman so coiffed, so platinum, so perfectly symmetrical that she seemed almost unreal. She was a living Barbie doll. She looked nothing like her daughter, who had mousy brown hair and a hooked nose. I instinctively registered the mother as the ideal, and the daughter as the deviation.

It wasn’t until decades later, at a high school reunion, that I saw my classmate had grown into her mother’s image. By then, she had the same hair color and same features. Perhaps the same plastic surgeon.

I found myself wondering why, as a teenager, my eye had so easily accepted something so obviously constructed. Why hadn’t I been more disposed to rejecting the artificial in favor of the natural?

I feel a similar bewilderment when it comes to designer dogs - especially pugs, bulldogs, whippets and sharpeis. Just a few generations ago, their ancestors looked entirely different. They were healthier, more proportionate, more canine.

When I used to walk my rescue dog Boo, he would physically recoil at these creatures. He sensed their distortion from the natural world. Why don’t we humans have the same reaction to designer people?

I found myself wondering the same thing during a recent SiriusXM conversation with Tarpley Hitt, author of Barbie Land: The Unauthorized History. On the show, we discussed the enduring cultural power of the world’s most famous doll - a figure whose features and proportions have long defied biological reality, yet remain widely accepted, even aspirational.

Whereas Boo instinctively rejected the unnatural and unhealthy look of purebred dogs, I (and countless other little girls) were conditioned to admire those same distortions in our Barbie dolls.

Barbie and the Edge of the Uncanny Valley

Barbie has always been a strange kind of human. Not realistic, exactly. But not abstract enough to be purely symbolic either. She sits somewhere in between: recognizable, aspirational, and yet utterly artificial. She lives right on the edge of the “uncanny valley.”

Coined in 1970 by Japanese technologist Masahiro Mori, the uncanny valley describes the discomfort we feel when something appears almost human, but not quite. At that point, small imperfections - a slightly off expression, lifeless eyes, unnatural texture - become magnified and evoke a sense of unease.

Which begs the question: why has Barbie endured when other uncanny-looking dolls (like Cabbage Patch kids with their lumpy faces and Bratz with their exaggerated lips and eyes) have fallen by the wayside?

The Aesthetic Strategy of Emptiness

According to Tarpley Hitt, Barbie was never really meant to be a person. She was designed as a slate for projection. She has no real backstory, no fixed personality, no interior life to constrain her. She could be anything because, at her core, she is nothing. Her emptiness was - and still is - an aesthetic strategy.

That strategy has been there from the beginning.

The familiar origin story casts Barbie as a product of maternal insight. Ruth Handler, the company’s founder, claimed that while watching her daughter play with paper dolls, she realized girls wanted to imagine themselves as adults. But in Tarpley’s research, a different origin story emerges.

Before Barbie, there was Bild Lilli, a German doll based on a flirtatious comic-strip character. Lilli was not intended for children; she was sold largely to men as a novelty item. When Ruth Handler encountered Lilli on a trip to Europe, she recognized a gap in the American market: an adult-bodied female doll. She adapted that form, launching Barbie in the United States in 1959.

Barbie Was Not a Toy, but a Tool

Barbie was never just a doll. As Tarpley noted, the real business was in extension lines - like Barbie outfits, accessories, and eventually, entire lifestyle products. Internally, she was even nicknamed by the parent company Mattel: “Our Lady of Perpetual Income.”

That flexibility made her uniquely resilient. Unlike narrative-driven toys, she had no fixed identity to outgrow. When culture shifted, she didn’t need to be replaced, just restyled.

For decades, that blank perfection read as fantasy. Today, it seems to be getting closer to reality. We now live in a world of filtered faces, cosmetic enhancements, and carefully curated identities. As a result, the boundary between the real and the artificial is getting more and more blurry. Our reversion toward the uncanny valley has not disappeared, but the line has definitely moved …or perhaps we’ve moved toward it.

Barbie Walks the Oscars

I was struck by this while watching the Oscars earlier this month. Certain actresses, particularly those who have been in the public eye for decades, looked less like versions of themselves and more like approximations of a shared aesthetic ideal.

Nicole Kidman and Demi Moore, in particular.

Both women, whose careers have spanned a generation, now occupy a space adjacent to the one Barbie has long held. The effect is not obviously unnatural. If anything, it is exquisitely well executed. And yet, the artifice has become so advanced it no longer registers as such.

The signs of aging and typical irregularities that, in earlier generations, distinguished one face from another have been softened or erased. What remains is a frozen surface. The result is beautiful, but disconnected from the messiness of lived experience.

Perhaps the distance between the real and the rendered has narrowed? Or perhaps something simpler: the Barbie form, once an obvious exaggeration, now serves as a template.

The AI Frontier

Our shifting standards become even more unsettling in the realm of AI-generated personas. Consider the emergence of Jessica Foster - a “MAGA girl” who has amassed more than a million social media followers in a few months.

What’s disturbing is not just that she is entirely synthetic, but that she has been calibrated to feel real. Some men have fallen for her, in part, because she is stripped of the very qualities that make real women dimensional and complex.

In that sense, she occupies the same territory Barbie first mapped out: human-adjacent, but optimized. The difference is that Barbie never tried to pass as real. Figures like Jessica Foster do.

Why Barbie Endures

Which brings us back to why the archetype of Barbie still matters. It is not because our society reveres dolls. If anything, as Tarpley noted, girls today age out of them earlier than ever. But while the desire to play with dolls has diminished, the aesthetics of Barbie has not.

What was once contained in plastic has migrated into culture. We are all, to some degree, optimizing versions of ourselves. Barbie’s idealization reveals just how far we’re willing to go. Perhaps that’s why she still feels so current. It’s not because she has changed, but because we have.

If aesthetic tastes are patterned and predictable, then who - or what - shapes them? In next week’s masterclass, I’ll explore how taste is formed: where it originates, how it evolves, and why certain aesthetics take hold while others fade. Because to understand the power of archetypes like Barbie is not just to analyze them, but to recognize the forces that made them feel inevitable in the first place.

Cheers, Pauline

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And if you want to learn more about my world please visit my newly renovated website :

https://aestheticintelligence.com/

The business of ice cream - the focus of my latest Aesthetic Case Study - offers a compelling lens for examining value creation in the meaning economy. Its evolution shows how something seemingly simple can become culturally charged. My interest in the category is not only analytical, but personal. Like many, I associate ice cream with moments of indulgence, as well as nostalgia and identity.

In what follows, I examine ice cream not as a product, but as a sector shaped by a confluence of forces. The environments in which brands emerge encode the sensibilities of their cultural context. The individuals behind them imbue their companies with a distinct form of Aesthetic Intelligence. And while formats, flavors, and business models evolve, the brands that endure are those anchored in a clear set of beliefs about taste, experience, and meaning.

I always thought there were only two kinds of people in the world: sweet and savory. Recently, I learned that, even within the sweet camp, there are four distinct types: crunchy, tart, chewy, and creamy. I have no doubt which one I am.

Creamy. Yes, I’m an unapologetic ice cream person.

That may sound like a simplistic preference, but ice cream actually offers a surprisingly sophisticated lens on consumer culture and economic theory.

In my latest masterclass, I discussed the evolution of value creation: how we moved from the era of industrial goods, to brands, to experiences, and now to meaning. Indeed, we’ve now entered what I call the meaning economy.

In other words, we’ve moved beyond buying products for their function, brands for their identity, or experiences for their emotional impact, into an era where value is rooted in significance. In this context, consumers are not simply purchasing goods; they’re participating in shared systems of meaning composed of narratives, symbols, rituals, and communities that help them make sense of themselves and the world. Differentiation is no longer driven by features, but by philosophy.

Ice Cream as a Case Study in Meaning-Making

I found myself thinking about this progression during a recent SiriusXM podcast conversation with ice cream veterans David Stein and Sasha Grutman. David is a longtime ice cream entrepreneur, who helped shape the category through his early leadership at Steve’s (inventor the “mix-in” concept) and now leads the dairy-free ice cream maker Devoated. Sasha is a close friend and banker by day, whose deep appreciation for food and elevated tastes bring a distinct and discerning perspective to the conversation.

What began as a discussion about the business of ice cream quickly led to something much broader:

What transforms a simple scoop into a meaningful and memorable experience?

Why and how have certain brands redefined the industry, while others disappeared?

And what does the future hold for ice cream as an economic and cultural category?

What follows is my latest Aesthetic Business Case Study - not of a single brand, but of an entire sector - demonstrating how applications of Aesthetic Intelligence have propelled its evolution.

Act I: The Industrial Good: Breyers and the Rise of Trust

For much of its history, ice cream was local. Dairy didn’t travel well, and what you ate depended on what was produced within a relatively small radius. Then came Breyers, which, as my podcast guest David Stein pointed out, became the first nationally distributed packaged ice cream brand.

Founded in 1866 in Philadelphia by William A. Breyer, the company began as a small operation selling hand-churned ice cream made from simple, high-quality ingredients. Breyers expanded steadily in the early 20th century, but it wasn’t until the post–World War II era that it achieved national distribution, as refrigeration, trucking, and supermarket chains scaled across the United States.

The value proposition was not built on a unique brand identity, but on consistency and trust, with simple packaging and a product line that was standardized, stable and legible to a mass market - hallmarks of the industrial age of consumer goods.

Breyers’ competitor Carvel, founded by Tom Carvel in the same era, introduced a hint of something more. Its soft serve format, ice cream cakes, and signature characters like Cookie Puss and Fudgie the Whale created new forms of entertainment and ritual, especially around birthdays and celebrations.

Even then, the category remained largely defined by scale, distribution, and familiarity. Ice cream brands were mostly meant to reassure their customers, not inspire them.

Act II: The Aspirational Image: Häagen-Dazs and the Power of Illusion

The next shift came not from technology, but from perception.

Häagen-Dazs, with a name that sounded vaguely Scandinavian, was founded in 1960 in the Bronx by Polish-American entrepreneurs Reuben and Rose Mattus. The brand did something deceptively simple: it presented ice cream as a luxury good, with its elegantly designed packaging and a name that connoted European refinement. The product felt more indulgent, more sophisticated, more adult.

Yet, nothing about the category had fundamentally changed. Here, branding moved beyond reassurance into aspiration. Consumers were no longer just buying a dessert; they were buying into a slightly more refined version of themselves.

Act III: The Social Experience: Steve’s and Ben & Jerry’s

If Häagen-Dazs elevated ice cream, Steve’s and Ben & Jerry’s transformed it.

When David Stein described his early days at Steve’s parlor in Somerville, MA, he didn’t talk about the flavors or recipes; he talked about the lines - long lines of college students (and their visiting parents) making a pilgrimage to a place that felt like a cultural event. The now-ubiquitous “mix-ins” were, at the time, revolutionary. Candy bars and cookies were chopped on a frozen slab and folded into softer, warmer ice cream.

But the real innovation was the theater. For the first time, ice cream became performance. And it became participatory.

Ben & Jerry’s took that experiential approach and scaled it. As my other guest, Sasha Grutman, observed, their genius was not just in the chunky textures, but in the clever naming of their flavors: Cherry Garcia. Chubby Hubby. Americone Dream. Steve’s may have invented the ice cream experience, but Ben & Jerry’s taught ice cream how to talk.

This was Aesthetic Intelligence at its best:

• multi-sensorial (texture, taste, temperature)

• symbolic (names, humor, identity)

• communal (lines, sharing, discovery)

Ice cream had become a social experience as well as a forum for self-expression.

Act IV: The Breakdown: When Function Replaces Feeling

Not every evolution is linear.

There was an unfortunate period when ice cream tried to become something it was never meant to be. The rise of “better-for-you” brands like TCBY (“The Country’s Best Yogurt”) and, more recently, Halo Top Creamery attempted to strip out the very elements that made ice cream compelling in the first place: sugar and fat.

As David noted in our conversation, the problem was a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the category. Ice cream is not consumed for nourishment; it’s consumed for joy.

This is where Aesthetic Intelligence failed. Function at the expense of feelings may have generated early trials, but it certainly didn’t lead to loyalty. TCBY’s parent company ultimately filed for bankruptcy in 2008, and Halo Top, once the top-selling pint in the U.S., is about 50% down from its peak.

Consumers will compromise on many things. Pleasure is not one of them.

That helps explain the rapid ascent of Van Leeuwen. What the team behind the brand seems to have understood, and what many others have missed, is that you cannot win by simply touting what’s removed from a product. You win by what is felt through it.

Van Leeuwen’s joyful colorways, childlike visual language, and emphasis on ingredient integrity work in concert to signal something deeper: this is ice cream that delivers pleasure, not compromise.

Act V: The Meaning Economy: From Experience to Cultural Relevance

Today, we are entering a new phase - one that is less about experience alone and more about meaning.

You see it in the proliferation of local and global variations - Indian ice creams in Brooklyn, Japanese dairy traditions, regional American dairies reclaiming their heritage.

What looks like fragmentation is, in fact, evolution. The new frontier is not just about what ice cream tastes like, but what it represents.

Meaning in ice cream is being constructed through:

• Place: local sourcing, regional identity, cultural specificity

• Memory: childhood rituals, family traditions, moments of first discovery

• Identity: what your preferences signal about who you are

• Community: shared experiences, sampling, belonging to a taste culture

One of the most poignant moments in our conversation came when Sasha described his mother arriving in the United States from Europe in 1942 and being handed a creamsicle. She never forgot it. That simple frozen treat became inseparable from her memory of entering a new country.

That’s not an industrial good. That’s meaning.

The Role of Aesthetic Intelligence

So what does this case study tell us?

At every stage of this evolution, value has been shaped not just by what is produced, but by how it is perceived, experienced, and shared.

Aesthetic Intelligence is the skill set that enables that transformation. It is not simply about making things look good, but about understanding fundamental drivers of human pleasure:

• why do certain textures unleash delight?

• why do certain rituals resonate so deeply?

• why do certain symbols endure over time?

• why do certain experiences become lasting memories?

Branding makes things noticeable. Aesthetic Intelligence makes them matter. And in a world where consumers have more than enough “stuff,” what remains precious is not products, but meaning.

Conclusion: The Future of Ice Cream

The future of ice cream will not be decided by the next flavor innovation or the next dietary workaround.

It will belong to the brands that understand something more fundamental: that consumers are not just choosing what to eat; they’re choosing how to feel, who to be, and what to belong to.

Ice cream, perhaps more than any other category, sits at the intersection of pleasure, memory, and identity. It’s deeply emotional and inherently social. It is, at its best, a small but powerful expression of aliveness.

As always, subscribe to stay in the loop!

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And if you want to learn more about my world please visit my newly renovated website : https://aestheticintelligence.com/

Cheers, Pauline

In our last session, I gave an orientation to my new course on The Foundations of Aesthetic Intelligence. Today, we turn to a topic that’s on everyone’s mind: artificial intelligence.

Specifically, in today’s session, we’ll explore

Is artificial intelligence actually intelligent? What even is intelligence?

As AI becomes more and more capable, what, if anything, can humans do that AI cannot?

How can we all leverage the enormous benefits of AI, while still maintaining a distinct and sustainable competitive advantage?

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In my last Substack, I wrote about the religiosity of healthy practices. But there is also a religious dimension to our ideals about the body itself, particularly the male body.

While body shape matters for women too - sometimes to a disfiguring degree - women still have many more levers of attractiveness: hair, makeup, clothing, accessories.

For men, the body carries disproportionate symbolic weight. Studies show a clearcut “height premium,” with taller men earning more and disproportionately occupying leadership roles.

Beyond height, a man’s strength, build, posture, and hairline are not just physical qualities; they’re status signals. And they’re hard to alter through styling or presentation. A 2025 study of MBA graduates reported that individuals rated as more attractive earned about $2,508 more per year on average, and those in the top 10% of attractiveness earned roughly $5,500 more annually.

Which is why the male body can be read as an aesthetic artifact of its era. Alexander the Great embodied the heroic ideal of the classical world, a vision of masculine beauty later mythologized in the Renaissance through Michelangelo’s smooth, sculpted marble. Some 500 years later, Arnold Schwarzenegger transformed the male body into a spectacle of exaggerated musculature and cinematic strength. Today the ideal persists in a new form: technologically optimized physiques, engineered both for - and increasingly by - digital displays.

The Kennedy Cousins: A Tale of Two Bodies

This was on my mind while watching the latest episode of the television series Love Story. The series chronicles the whirlwind romance of John F. Kennedy Jr., the golden boy of the ‘90s, and his wife Carolyn Bessette.

Watching footage of him today fills me with nostalgia. His body, posture, and style of athleticism embodied a particular version of American masculinity that prevailed during my own coming-of-age.

In contrast, his cousin - U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., fills me with dread. Politics aside (however much I dread his political positions), RFK Jr. embodies a darker strain of American masculinity- one defined less by natural strength than by grievance, suspicion, spectacle, and presumably steroids.

But what strikes me most is how dramatically the masculine archetype can shift within the same family and within a single generation.

Two Kennedys. Two bodies. Two entirely different ideals of the American man.

The Last Patrician Athlete

JFK Jr. embodied the aesthetic of the patrician athlete.

He was tall, broad-shouldered, naturally lean, and had the look of someone who grew up sailing, cycling, and playing touch football. His physique was fit but not aggressively muscular. It suggested healthy activity rather than prescriptive exercise.

This was the era before we felt the need (or had the tools) to engineer every inch of our bodies. Before wearable devices. Before protein macros. Before biohacking podcasts. Health expressed itself through vitality rather than metrics.

The MAHA Body Politic

Now consider RFK Jr.

At 72, he casts himself as a champion of physical and metabolic health - posting shirtless videos, doing pushups, chopping wood, flexing in the sun - all while preaching the virtues of “real food,” like fatty red meat and raw milk.

In his worldview, the body is a project to be mastered - emblematic of optimization culture, with its seed oils, peptides, metabolic health metrics, longevity protocols, cold plunges, and the relentless pursuit of a cleaner, stronger, more resilient self.

This ethos has found a political banner in the MAHA (“Make America Healthy Again”) movement that he has helped popularize. MAHA reframes public health as a battle against industrial food, environmental toxins, and pharmaceutical dependency, casting personal discipline and bodily purity as forms of civic renewal.

In that sense, Kennedy’s physique is not just personal branding but political argument: the optimized body as proof that a different relationship to food, medicine, and the modern world is possible.

Archetypes of Machismo

Seen through the lens of aesthetics, these two men occupy very different masculine archetypes. JFK Jr.’s aesthetic was aspirational but gentlemanly. A masculinity rooted in lineage, social grace, and quiet confidence. He also lived in an era in which we still trusted and admired elite institutions.

RFK Jr’s archetype is oppositional and defiant. He represents the renegade health warrior - the anti-establishment elder who claims to have uncovered truths not only about the human body, but about the broader system.

Two Political Bodies

The shift in masculine aesthetics is also visible across the manosphere.

Across podcasts, YouTube channels, and wellness subcultures, the male body has become a central site of ideological expression. Researchers have found that fitness influencers often serve as gateways into the manosphere, using gym culture, dietary discipline, and endurance challenges to frame physical transformation as a path to masculine authority and status.

The scale of the ecosystem is significant: one study of masculinity communities found more than 28 million posts across dozens of forums, while another study counted 300 million comments across 500 channels.

In this sphere, RFK Jr.’s archetype seems to resonate most with a particular segment: older men, libertarian in temperament, who reject institutional narratives about health (and most other conventional narratives as well) in favor of their own judgment.

But resonance is complicated.

Even among that audience, RFK Jr. doesn’t seem to capture the cultural imagination in the way JFK Jr. did in the 1990s or his father, Robert F. Kennedy Sr., did in the 1960s. Robert F. Kennedy Sr.’s authority was earned. John F. Kennedy Jr.’s was inherited. Neither needed to persuade anyone to follow.

The Body as Cultural Barometer

Regardless of political ideology, the contrast between JFK Jr. and RFK Jr. - their body types and their archetypes - is striking. It shows how even the most personal aspects of human identity reflect the cultural currents of their time.

Two Kennedys. Two bodies. Two different ideas of power.

And if archetypes evolve with culture, the next one may already be taking shape. Which raises the question:

What kind of physique will power embody next?

Next week I’ll be hosting my next masterclass, exploring how digital technologies - and more specifically, A.I. - are reshaping aesthetic tastes and what that means for businesses. Most importantly, I’ll offer strategies for you to retain and sharpen your own human advantage in an AI-driven world.

More details soon. Hope to see you in the classroom!

Cheers, Pauline

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That logic applies to bodies, too. Every era converges on a body it wants.

But the body itself is only part of the story. Each era also invents its own belief system around the body - complete with rituals, spaces, visual codes, and moral philosophies. Taken together, they begin to resemble something much older than the fitness industry itself: religion.

In that sense, the wellness industry feels less like a marketplace and more like a collection of competing faiths.

A New Era in the Wellness Industrial Complex

I was thinking about that recently during a conversation on SiriusXM with health writer Bill Gifford. Bill, who has spent decades covering science, sports and fitness, just released his latest book, Hotwired: How the Hidden Power of Heat Makes Us Stronger.

On the radio, Bill talked about the surprising benefits of heat and how age-old practices like saunas and hot baths can improve cardiovascular health, sleep, longevity and even mental health. According to the research, controlled thermal stress strengthens the body in the same way exercise does.

Consumers are clearly catching on. The global sauna market is expected to grow from about $860 million in 2023 to $1.3 billion by 2030.

Cold plunges are rising just as quickly. The market for cold-plunge tubs, once confined to professional sports training facilities, is projected to double within the next five years. (As an aside, Bill says the science behind cold exposure is far less compelling than that of heat. Phew!)

Our conversation made me wonder whether the wellness sector is entering a new era. Instead of choreographed routines or elaborate machines, today’s rituals revolve around elemental oppositions: heat and cold, darkness and light, stress and recovery. They feel less like exercise than acts of purification.

Resilience Through Ritual

Part of the rising popularity of saunas comes from the scientific findings. As Bill Gifford explains in his book, studies show that heat - like exercise, in general - creates a form of controlled stress that stimulates the body to become stronger and more resilient.

But the popularity of saunas (and cold plunges) cannot be explained by physiology alone. I believe the appeal is also aesthetic.

In an era of digital overload, pandemic anxiety, and relentless self-optimization, practices that promise resilience through elemental stressors - steam rooms, sweat lodges, ice baths, intermittent fasting, hyperbaric therapy, hypoxic training, and dawn simulators - feel both ancient and oddly modern.

They echo something familiar across cultures and centuries: the idea that endurance, purification, and transformation can be achieved through ritualized discomfort.

The Purification of Sauna Culture

New sauna spaces don’t look like gyms. They look like sacred monasteries. Cedar-lined sauna rooms glow with amber light. Stone floors lead to silent pools of icy water. Matte black plunge tubs sit like minimalist sculptures.

They evoke something older than wellness itself: the belief that physical suffering - when carefully structured and repeated - can purify the body and renew the self.

Their rituals are simple. Enter the heat. Endure the cold. Repeat.

The Protestant Work Ethic of Jack LaLanne

To understand just how religious today’s health and fitness culture has become, it helps to look back.

Modern American fitness arguably began with Jack LaLanne.

When The Jack LaLanne Show debuted in 1951, television itself was still new. LaLanne appeared in a simple jumpsuit on a bare set, leading viewers through calisthenics while preaching the virtues of vegetables and daily exercise.

The aesthetic was austere: black-and-white broadcasts, minimal equipment, and a tone of cheerful discipline. The philosophy underlying this movement was governed by morality. Fitness was not framed as pleasure or indulgence but as duty.

A strong body symbolized the moral clarity, personal responsibility, and vigor of the post-World War II era.

In this sense, LaLanne’s philosophy resembled a kind of Protestant ethic: daily practice, restraint, and the belief that character is built through arduous physical work.

The Aerobics Revival

By the 1980s, the zeitgeist had changed. If LaLanne represented moral discipline, the aerobics boom felt closer to a Christian revival meeting.

Jane Fonda’s workout tapes, first released in 1982, became a cultural phenomenon. Aerobics classes spread through suburban gyms and community centers, accompanied by pounding music and synchronized choreography.

The aesthetic of this movement was unmistakable: spandex leotards, leg warmers, VHS tapes, mirrored studios, and rows of bodies moving in rhythmic unison. Fitness became theatrical.

Evangelical instructors led groups through rhythmic routines while music surged through brightly lit rooms. The atmosphere was collective, energetic, and exuberant.

The Zen Minimalism of Yoga

By the early 2000s, the pendulum swung again. After decades of high-impact, flashy fitness culture, the next movement was defined by serenity and mindfulness. The goal was no longer to project energy, but to achieve a sense of inner peace and balance.

The spaces themselves reflected that philosophy. Studios were designed to soothe rather than stimulate, with minimalist interiors, natural materials, and hushed atmospheres. They looked less like gyms than like meditation retreats.

Instructors focused on breathing, alignment, and small, controlled movements rather than pounding music or intense exertion.

The Soul Cycle Cathedral

In the 2010s, another denomination prevailed. Luxury studios like SoulCycle and Tracy Anderson Method transformed exercise into a highly choreographed experience.

The design was unmistakably liturgical. Entrances looked like sanctuaries, with marble lobbies, curated scents, and an atmosphere of reverence. The studio itself was dimly lit, candles flickering near the instructor’s podium, as rows of riders faced forward like congregants.

Sessions adhered to a ritual order: warm-up, climb, sprint, recovery, with movements performed in unison to music that swelled like a hymn. At the center stood the instructor, part coach and part deacon, delivering exhortations about strength, gratitude, and transformation.

The experience felt less like a workout than a service.

The Anatomy of All Religious Movements

Across these very different movements, a recognizable pattern emerges. Each sits at the intersection of three forces - many of the same forces that historically gave rise to religious orders themselves.

First, a persuasive physiological insight: a claim about the body that arrives like an enlightenment. Jack LaLanne championed circulation and nutrition as Americans became increasingly sedentary. Aerobics rode the wave of cardiovascular science. Pilates and yoga drew on biomechanics and breath control. Boutique studios emphasized metabolic conditioning and muscle transformation. Today, sauna culture links controlled heat exposure to mental health and longevity.

Second, these ideas gain traction because they address specific sources of societal anxiety. Postwar fears of stagnation, the sedentary office culture of the 1980s, the challenges of work-life balance in the 2000s, and today’s relentless digital assault have each opened the door to new forms of physical activity.

But the third force - and the one most relevant to my thesis here - is aesthetic. Every successful movement develops a visual language, spatial environment, and brand codes that makes participation feel meaningful, even sacred.

• LaLanne’s black-and-white television workouts embodied discipline and moral clarity.

• The aerobics boom played out in mirrored studios filled with neon color and synchronized choreography.

• Yoga studios were designed with pale woods, soft lighting, and minimal architecture to cultivate calm and inward focus.

• SoulCycle and Tracy Anderson created temple-like spaces, with marble entrances, vaulted ceilings, tightly packed congregations, and motivational sermons delivered from on high.

• And today’s sauna culture carries its own monastic codes: cedar-lined rooms glowing with amber light, heaps of stones, rising steam, and silent plunges into icy water to shock the body after rounds of sweat-soaked heat.

Today’s Religion of Resilience

So what is the ideal body type in 2026? And what does it reveal about the religious order of our time?

In today’s age of volatility and unpredictability, the most compelling wellness rituals are those that push our bodies through controlled stress and then allow us to recover.

But the appeal of these practices extends beyond physiology into ritual and belief. In a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, automation, and digital abstraction, the human body has become one of the few domains that still feels indisputably real. We may delegate thinking, writing, and even decision-making to machines, but sweat, heat, cold, exhaustion, and recovery remain stubbornly physical experiences.

That may explain why the dominant wellness rituals revolve around elemental trials: saunas, cold plunges, fasting, breath work, endurance training. They are simple, almost primitive acts that reaffirm something fundamental - that we’re still embodied creatures.

The aesthetics of modern wellness draw on something timeless and ancient: purification through discomfort, renewal through repetition, and the belief that endurance can strengthen the self.

In the age of AI, the body itself has become a kind of sanctuary. And it’s one of the last places where transformation still feels possible.

Cheers, Pauline

For the past decade, I’ve been teaching a concept I call Aesthetic Intelligence - first through a book, then in classrooms at Harvard and Columbia, and later through workshops with corporate leaders and entrepreneurial founders. But I’ve long felt that the curriculum deserved a more accessible home. This masterclass is the result.

In this ne…

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That line of inquiry forms one pillar of this Substack platform: Aesthetic Brand Case Studies.

A second pillar, Aesthetic Archetypes, moves from brands to individuals. It aligns with the theme of my forthcoming book, which explores how personal taste is formed and how it reflects a constellation of influences in our lives, ranging from upbringing to environment to cultural cues.

Today, I’m introducing the third pillar: The Aesthetic Intelligence Masterclass. This one is about practice. For years, I taught this to MBA students - first at Harvard Business School, then Columbia. My students paid many thousands of dollars to learn how to develop the judgment to balance a company’s financial and creative objectives. In a nutshell, they learned how to use taste as strategy.

Again and again, one realization would land. Taste is not a mysterious gift. It’s not fixed. It’s not reserved for a particular class. It’s a muscle. And like any muscle, it must be exercised.

We’re living in a moment when this matters more than ever. Thanks to A.I., barriers to analysis and production have collapsed. What has become scarce is judgment. The ability to select, edit, refine, and reject. The ability to distinguish between what is loud and what is lasting. To recognize the difference between what’s trending and what’s true.

This new series is a masterclass in that discipline. Over the course of the coming months, I’ll present lectures through multiple lenses:

• Strategy: How can companies re-instill and preserve aesthetic value and leverage it for long-term competitive advantage?

• Science and Analytics: What is the scientific evidence for the value of aesthetics?

• Experiential Design: How can a business create truly immersive experiences for its customers?

• Societal and Cultural Factors: How does society and culture impact aesthetics, and how can aesthetics transform society and culture?

• Creative Management: How do aesthetic businesses maintain, scale and sustain an appropriate balance of power between creative talent and their counterparts in financial/operational/analytical functions?

• Branding and Communications: What are the key aesthetic elements in branding and communications?

• Organization: How do aesthetic businesses build and support the right culture, organizational structure, and decision-making processes to ensure long-term success, especially after the loss of the founders?

• Digital Impact: How are digital technologies affecting aesthetic businesses and industries?

• Future Technologies: Will there be a new, tech-driven aesthetics in the future?

But first, we begin at the beginning. I’ll start this week with an orientation to Aesthetic Intelligence: What is it? Why it’s important? And how it’s developed?

Consider this your invitation to my classroom.

Cheers, Pauline

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Mrs. Estée Lauder (whom I profiled in Part I) mastered retail theater. Her successors (in Part II) perfected television shopping. Today’s iteration of the archetype (Part III, below) builds and commands an online community. She no longer negotiates for shelf space or airtime; she just populates her feed. But she does it deftly - in real time, in public, sometimes from her bedroom.

The question today is no longer whether and how that archetype leverages social media for commercial success. The real question is whether her success can be sustained? And, more critically, whether the very source of her success - her influence - can be codified into systems that scale beyond her own performance?

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From Tell-a-Woman to Tell-the-Camera

At the heart of Mrs. Estée Lauder’s ascent was a deceptively simple sales strategy:

“Telephone, telegraph, tell-a-woman.”

It was more than a slogan; it was a philosophy about influence.

Estée understood that her sales grew through perceptions of intimacy, proximity, trust, and what we now call “social selling.” In her day, it might begin with a passing compliment or a trusted tip from a beauty advisor, continue with a free sample tucked into a customer’s gift bag, and culminate in that customer leaning in to whisper to her friends, “You have to try this.”

By the late twentieth century, the medium had changed, but the instinct had not. If Estée mastered the beauty counter, her successors mastered the camera. By then, the department stores were no longer the primary arena for social selling; television was. And The Cosmetic Executive Woman - always attuned to the prevailing channels of influence - followed her customers there.

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I begin with a three-part study of a pa…

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Behind the lipstick we wear. The vacations we plan. The careers we build. The people we follow. The ones we marry.

These choices aren’t random. They’re expressions of taste or, as I call it, Aesthetic Intelligence.

For years I’ve explored how taste effects business - how it sparks consumer trends and manifests in brand identity. And, I’ve shown how it can serve as a critical strategic advantage. That inquiry forms one pillar of my current work: Aesthetic Brand Case Studies.

Today, I’m introducing a second pillar: Aesthetic Archetypes.

This new series is deeply aligned with the theme of my forthcoming book, which is about decoding personal taste. (More on that in the months ahead.)

If Aesthetic Intelligence is essentially about why taste matters and how it can be cultivated - and if Aesthetic Brand Case Studies is about how taste is formed and used to build and sustain world-class brands - then Aesthetic Archetypes is about the myriad forces that determine how we express ourselves and why.

Why Archetypes? Why Now?

A lot of people think of topics like taste and style as something subjective, superficial, and even whimsical. But, as I often say:

Good style is full of substance.

The way we express ourselves is not accidental; it is patterned.

And those patterns are created by the interplay of three powerful forces:

1. Genetics: our innate proclivities formed by biological, physiological and psychological wiring.

2. Cultural Context: the time and place in which we come of age.

3. Relationships: the people who influence, challenge, and define our aesthetic experiences, exposures, and ideals.

Whether we’re aware of it or not, these three forces converge to shape the distinct way each of us sees and responds to the world around us. Together, they form our Aesthetic Archetypes.

In this new series, I’ll profile individuals who not only embody a distinct archetype, but who have become iconic in their own right. And I’ll examine the forces that shaped the inner drivers of the person whom we see and admire from afar.

The Inaugural Edition: the Cosmetic Executive Woman

We begin with a world I know well.

The first essays in this new series will spotlight women who embody the epitome of the beauty industry - an arena shaped by some of the most interesting, eccentric, and pioneering women in modern culture.

The inspiration for this series came unexpectedly. Recently, I had the privilege of hosting a SiriusXM conversation with Carlotta Jacobson, the former President of CEW (the world’s largest trade organization for Cosmetic Executive Women) and her successor, Elana Szyfer. As I listened to them reflect on-air about the evolution of the beauty industry - its shifts in power, distribution, brand messaging, and leadership styles - I found myself struck by something deeper than the industry’s transformation.

I was struck by the evolution of the archetypal female leaders within it.

While the archetype of these successful women has evolved considerably, their character has consistently been shaped by a set of common drivers:

• Aspiration and appreciation of beauty and glamour,

• Profound respect for professional discipline,

• Ability to balance the inherent tension between creativity and commerce,

• Nuanced understanding of the psychology behind an industry driven by intimacy, identity, and self-expression, and

• Embrace of feminized empowerment.

Listening to Carlotta and Elana, I began tracing the evolution of this archetype across different eras, generations, and cultural contexts.

A Personal Lineage

My relationship with the beauty industry spans several decades, including time on the board of CEW. It therefore feels especially fitting to open this series with a study of the Cosmetic Executive Woman.

As a teenager in the 1970s and 80s, I was enthralled by makeup. I viewed it then - and still - as a powerful tool for transformation. And I always have enjoyed the ritual of mixing and applying powders and pigments to faces.

During my executive years at Estée Lauder and LVMH, I came to know the industry from the inside: the discipline required to bring new products to market, to transform a line into a brand, and to build a brand into a global business. In other words, I witnessed firsthand how taste is cultivated, applied, scaled, and ultimately institutionalized.

Along the way, I learned from a powerhouse group of women. In this series, I’ll reflect on that lineage and on the archetype they came to embody.

What You Can Expect

In each essay within the Aesthetic Archetypes series, I will:

• Profile a figure (or set of figures) who epitomize a distinct archetype;

• Reflect on the circumstances and relationships that shaped them;

• Examine how their archetype informed their leadership and impact; and

• Connect their story to broader socio-cultural movements.

Each essay will offer a new lens through which to understand how Aesthetic Intelligence comes alive in an iconic character. The Cosmetic Executive Woman is just the beginning.

No exploration of the Cosmetic Executive Woman is complete without a deep dive into Mrs. Estée Lauder. We begin later this week with her. I’ll then turn to other women who embodied the same archetype, but in dramatically different eras. Together, these portraits will trace the evolution of beauty and the formidable women who paved the way.

Cheers, Pauline

Despite my own proximity to the company as a former vendor, competitor, and board member, I never actually worked there. For that vantage point, I turned to someone who not only spent a decade in the senior ranks, but who was there during the company’s most formative and dynamic years.

What follows are key takeaways from an extended conversation with retail legend Neal J. Fox, now in his 90s. Neal joined Neiman Marcus in 1966 and served as a senior executive during what many consider its golden era. His recollections offer something my research and observations cannot: an unvarnished view of the leadership and culture as experienced from the inside.

This series is available to paid subscribers only.

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Neiman Marcus offers a compelling entry point for my new sub-series on Aesthetic Brand Case Studies. Its history shows how aesthetic value is created and just how easily it can erode. My interest in the company is also deeply personal. It’s one I’ve encountered at nearly every juncture in my career.

In Part 1 of the series, I examined the conditions that shaped the company’s founding. After all, for any aesthetic brand, the cultural moment and geographic context of its birth determine the aesthetic sensibilities it encodes and the standards it sets.

In Part 2, I explored the individuals who defined the company and the Aesthetic Intelligence they brought to it. Because aesthetic brands are not neutral constructs; they are reflections of their founders’ worldview, values, and sense of beauty.

In today’s edition (Part 3), I turn to the core values that endured beyond shifting cultural contexts and individual leaders. Strategies must change. Business models evolve. Leaders move on. But one thing must remain constant: the values and beliefs at the heart of every aesthetic brand.

This series is available to paid subscribers.

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Neiman Marcus is an important case study in what I call ‘the Business of Aesthetics.’ It’s a company I’ve observed from many different angles. Early in my career at Estée Lauder, it was the most coveted retail partner for our prestige beauty brands. Years later, at Carlyle, I evaluated the opportunity to acquire it. At LVMH, I tracked it closely as both a vendor and a competitor. And then, in 2020, I joined its board of directors. I served on the board until it was acquired by Saks in late 2024 - only to watch it (and its new parent) enter bankruptcy just a year after the merger.

I chose to kick off this new series of Aesthetic Brand Case Studies with a deep-dive on Neiman Marcus, because the company so clearly illustrates both the power and the fragility of all aesthetic businesses.

The Neiman Marcus story offers unusually rich terrain for understanding how aesthetic vision is created, scaled, sustained, and, at times, lost. In yesterday’s essay (Part 1), I explored the conditions in which the company was established. In today’s edition (Part 2), we turn to the individuals who shaped it - and how their own Aesthetic Intelligence was formed. In tomorrow’s edition (Part 3), I will examine the core aesthetic values that endured amid changing times, strategies, and leaders.

Taken together, these three chapters invite a larger question: What does it truly take to build an aesthetic institution that outlives its founders and current circumstances - and what may cause it, eventually, to fail?

This case study is available to paid subscribers only.

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Neiman Marcus is a good case study of an aesthetic business. It’s one I know quite well. Early in my career at Estée Lauder, it was the most coveted retail partner for all our prestige beauty brands. Years later, as a partner at the private equity firm Carlyle, I looked at the prospect of acquiring it. (Another firm ultimately did the deal.) I continued to follow the company closely as both a vendor and a competitor during my time at LVMH.

Then, in 2020, at the height of the Covid crisis, Neiman Marcus filed for bankruptcy. After emerging under new ownership, I was invited to join the Board of Directors. I served on the Board until it was sold to Saks in late 2024.

Just a year later, Neiman Marcus - alongside its parent company, Saks Global - once again entered bankruptcy. Whatever its future may hold, its past remains deeply instructive.

In the following three-part series, I’ll explore critical elements of its past, including the circumstances of its founding, the people who brought it to life, and the values and ideas that have endured throughout its long history.

The remainder of Part I is available to paid subscribers.

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From the Desk of Pauline Brown

I’ve always been fascinated by companies that do more than sell products: ones that shape our culture, spark new movements, and influence how we experience beauty. That fascination is what led me to launch a new sub-series on this Substack.

In addition to my ongoing missives on why taste matters and how to cultivate your own personal tastes, this series will explore how best-in-class companies use taste as strategy.

Each month, I’ll delve into one company founded and led by people with exceptional Aesthetic Intelligence. I’ll look at why the company initially succeeded, how it evolved over time, what cultural and commercial challenges it faced along the way, and how it managed to stay relevant (or not!) in an ever-changing landscape.

My core thesis is simple: when it comes to aesthetic businesses, people and strategies inevitably must change, but their underlying aesthetic philosophies, values and principles cannot.

This series is an attempt to make those invisible assets visible and to show how aesthetics - when properly understood, codified, applied and institutionalized - can serve as a company’s most viable and sustainable competitive advantage.

Case Study #1: Neiman Marcus

I’ll launch this series tomorrow with my first case: Neiman Marcus. It’s a company I know well. Early in my career at Estée Lauder, it was the most coveted retail partner for all our prestige beauty brands. Years later, as a partner at Carlyle, I looked at the prospect of acquiring it and taking it private. (Another investment firm ultimately did the deal.) I continued to follow Neiman Marcus closely in my role at LVMH, as both a vendor and a competitor. And, finally, while teaching at Harvard Business School, I gave a talk on Neiman Marcus in the context of strategic differentiation and experiential retail amid technological disruptions.

Then, in 2020, at the height of the Covid crisis, Neiman Marcus filed for bankruptcy. Post-bankruptcy and under new ownership, I was invited to join its Board of Directors, where I served until the company was sold to Saks in late 2024. About a year later, Neiman Marcus - under the umbrella of its parent Saks - once again entered into bankruptcy.

This latest development has put Neiman Marcus back in the news. But this case study won’t focus on headlines of the moment. Instead, it’ll reflect on how the company survived - and even thrived - for more than a century and what enduring lessons its story holds for today’s brands.

In addition to unpacking the story in three distinct parts, I’ll conclude with insights from a rare, supplementary interview with someone who had a front-row seat at the company more than 50 years ago. Consider this an invitation to look beyond the news cycle and into the DNA of a retail legend.

Cheers, Pauline