Aesthetic Intelligence comes from a deep and personal place for me. As head of North America for one of the world’s leading fashion companies, I had what many described as the “best job in the word.” I attended fashion shows not only in epicenters such as New York and Paris, but also in remote places like Reykjavík. Black-tie galas—sometimes two in one night—were routine. However, for the most part, it was a job that consisted of back-to-back meetings, tedious conference calls, and endless budgeting and planning sessions, followed by unplanning and replanning sessions. There were also hiring and firing and analyses. Lots of analyses. Brand-by-brand analyses. Market-by-market analyses. Store-by-store analyses.
As 2015 was coming to an end, my family and I took a trip to Vienna. There I stood in front of what was once my great-grandfather’s clothing store, called Kleiderhaus Goldstein, at 44 Kaiserstrasse. I thought to myself, Israel Goldstein would have been proud of his great-granddaughter’s success. In his day, there were no women at the top of any business or profession. A Jewish woman at the top would have been unthinkable. That said, I think he would have been disappointed by my field of work—fashion—and how far it has strayed from the field he once knew and loved.
All four of my grandparents narrowly escaped the Holocaust. My paternal grandparents fled Vienna for New York in 1939. My maternal grandparents emigrated in that same era from Frankfurt to Cape Town via Barcelona—a circuitous route made all the more traumatic by the Spanish Civil War. On both sides of my family, it was the women—my grandmothers—who supported their families through harrowing times. They did so through fashion—aesthetics—as founders of their own small apparel companies.
As I look critically at the fashion sector today, I believe that it has lost its raison d’être. When I entered the industry twenty-five years ago, people loved to shop, especially for clothes. They experienced it as a form of entertainment. Today, with quick, direct digital access to any product you want and a preference for experiences over material goods, visiting a store to buy yet another handbag is not very compelling. Shopping no longer meets people’s needs or stimulates their creativity. This is also true of most other businesses and industries. As businesspeople we’ve become so focused on the bottom line, on driving consumption of products that fewer and fewer consumers even want anymore, that we have lost touch with what we produce. To survive, we need to reinstill a human touch into what we are doing—and know why we’re doing it. If there is anything you take away from this book—and I hope you take away quite a bit—it is that:
My hope is that Aesthetic Intelligence will spur more appreciation, investment, and effort into that which people genuinely and eternally seek: aesthetic delight. The future of business depends on it.