Poolside

Slim Aaron´s poolside collection, offers a place in the sun, gorgeous images of the glamorous and the wealthy, of jet-lagged jetsetters, of beautiful people living fabulous lives. Yet this collection still a compendium of the rich and well-connected "doing attractive things" in their favorite playgrounds, offers a new theme: pools, and everything that goes with them. Here are magnificent, suntanned bodies; well-oiled skin; bikini-clad women; summer cocktails on sun-drenched verandahs; sumptuous buffets; spectacular locations; and, most of all, fun. In Poolside, we will be allowed a peek into privileged lives, to which Slim Aarons was given unprecedented access in his heyday during the sixties, seventies, and eighties. From the Bahamas to Italy, from Mexico to Monaco, Poolside with Slim Aarons whisks readers away to exclusive clubs and private retreats where dreams become realities and taste, style, luxury, and grandeur prevail.

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A Place in the Sun

The focus of every respectable place in the sun is now the swimming pool. Always favoring natural light to shoot in, here is where Slim Aarons did some of his best and sexiest work — poolside, glorious poolside, exposures extraordinaire both public and private. With beautiful, seminude girls tanning in a tranquil sun. The great blue pools of today began with the new millionaires in Hollywood. The trend of having the stars pose for publicity photographs at home poolside started, oozing sex appeal in their bathing suits. Pools became the jewel in the crown of mid-twentieth-century home design, status, and social life.

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The Jet set Lifestyle

It was lgor Cassini, writing as the society columnist, who invented the term "jet set" in the late 1950s. Cassini, said, "It was the only name for my gang because it was a style that was new. Jets were glamorous then, and speeding airplanes around the globe, gave a sense of luxury and power. The expense guaranteed exclusivity and the unexpected encounters with friends in the VIP lounge.

Jetset utopianism promised not just jet set commitment-free sex, playboys like Warren Beatty and Hugh Hefner, and a new breed of debutantes and models, even the widowed Jacqueline Kennedy was globetrotting during and after grief but also jetset attitudes: interior decoration with lighter, more comfortable furniture; an international cuisine that brought quiche to Grosse Point, cappuccino to Palm Springs, cheeseburgers to Cap Ferrat; shorter skirts and no more bras for the ladies, open collars and no neckties for the gentlemen; and constant diversions, such as backgammon, a few close friends, inevitably a couple of spouses, children away at boarding school, lovers flying in, and hundreds of new acquaintances.

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Poolside Bliss

The birds. The bougainvillea. Nature's stillness. Sweet jasmine. The glittering pool. A slow honeybee. What you will notice and remember most is the exquisite quiet of the rich. It is your typical jet set day. You wake up around ten and have breakfast in your room, brought to you on a tray; or if you are a morning sort you go down to the terrace overlooking the pool. By eleven you are sitting at the pool with your host, rehashing what happened last night: the romances, the wine, You don't have a cell phone, a laptop, or an iPod they haven’t been invented yet so before you've come down to the pool you have made your calls efficiently so as not to tie up your host's phone line, calling your wife, your lover, your children, your trust officer, your pharmacist. If you haven't done so already in your room, before the morning advances too far you might look at the International Herald Tribune in case anyone your host is always inviting neighbors and their houseguests for lunch and dinner-brings up any front-page news.

If you are a man, you are wearing a blue linen shirt buttoned only once, near the belly button in the upper classes only the pool boy's belly button is considered an erogenous zone. Your bathing trunks are neither oversized nor itsy-bitsy and were made by your tailor or are something you picked up in Saint-Tropez. Always go for a bathing-suit look that one might describe as ... no, not "suggestive," that would be vulgar, but "promising". If you are a woman, you are wearing either a one-piece or two-piece Pucci or Eres suit, a Hermès scarf tied turban-style or your sunhat in a handsomely woven straw affair.

Around two the luncheon is served. Confident hosts always serve the local cuisine; it appears to sophisticated travelers hungry for the lay of the land, vegetables from the garden, and fish from the sea. A paella in Spain, pasta in ltaly, If you are on a boat, it is usually a tidy frittata and some fresh fruit for dessert. Even in the hot sun, rosé is not considered serious drinking because it is a special summer coolant as indigenous to the resort's well-being as spring water.