Aerin Lauder’s New Book Illustrates The Impact Of Flowers On Her Life—and How Grandmother Estée Lauder ‘Really Taught Me A Lot’

Aerin Lauder sits down to chat with me the day after the launch of her new book, Living with Flowers, at the Ralph Lauren flagship in New York City, an event she calls “such an honor.”

Lauren, she said, is someone who she’s always looked up to, calling him “the most incredible marketer around, aside from my grandmother”—the one and only Estée Lauder.

“I think he’s the brilliant mastermind behind branding, and just what he’s launched as a lifestyle brand—and he’s such a style icon,” Lauder says of Lauren.

Naturally, when one writes a book called Living with Flowers, there can be no shortage of them at the launch party. And that was so on March 3, as guests like Wes Gordon, Lauren Bush Lauren and Athena Calderone gathered alongside flowers of various sizes and colors, classic Polo Bar cocktails on hand for the taking.

Of the photo-filled Rizzoli book—which is also bursting with Lauder’s deep connection to flowers, from her personal life at home to her lifestyle brand AERIN—co-host David Lauren told WWD, “It’s beautiful. It gives you emotion right away. It’s a wonderful oasis from the chaos and the cold air. It’s full of color and warmth and it just feels homey—and feels like a place you want to live.”

“It is amazing how flowers really speak to people,” he continued. “You know, it’s a subliminal thing, whether it’s in the smell, or about the colors, but it does something to you mentally. We forget about nature. But it’s the simplest way, in a big urban house, or in a country house, to just feel alive.”

Lauder posted a photo to her Instagram Story of herself in front of a mirror on the night of the launch party, posing with a vintage bag from Hermès that her beloved grandmother once carried. “Estée always by my side,” she wrote alongside the image, adding, “I always wear a touch of Estée for special launches.”

Estée was not only present sartorially at the book’s launch but is felt throughout the pages of the book itself. “Flowers meant so much to Estée,” Lauder tells me via Zoom. “I think she was the first person to teach me the importance of home and making a home, a home. And that meant beautiful flowers and plants and photographs and memory items that kind of insinuate memories, and flowers played a very, very important role in her life and her business. So I think she really taught me a lot about flowers and the symbolism of flowers.”

“My grandmother was very inspired by flowers in many of her fragrances”

Estée not only built a cosmetics empire that included a large fragrance offering, but she had a collection of prized floral china and made sure her home was always filled with blooms. “She always believed that when you would enter someone’s home—the front area—that a beautiful, fresh arrangement of flowers was the most ideal way to welcome guests into your home,” Lauder says. “And there’s a beautiful photograph in the book of my grandparents greeting guests in Palm Beach with a beautiful arrangement and white fragrant flowers. And she was the first one to introduce me to gardenias and tuberose. So flowers really play a very important part of my history.”

And Lauder’s present. She is the founder and creative director of AERIN, which boasts 24 fragrances—and most all have floral notes in them. “The same goes for Estée Lauder,” Lauder says of the company, which she is still closely associated with as the style and design director for the brand’s Re-Nutriv line. “Estée Lauder was always—my grandmother was very inspired by flowers in many of her fragrances.”

One of Estée’s favorite notes to put in her expansive fragrance collection was Bulgarian rose, and that note remains in many of the brand’s fragrances even still today.

“Probably my earliest memory of my grandmother was her scent,” Lauder says, describing it as having a strong Bulgarian rose note to it, specifically the Estée Lauder fragrance Beautiful, which still is sold today. Estée worked on Beautiful for about six years, Lauder tells me, and she wore it all the time.

“When people were smelling the fragrance, they kept saying they would smell and be like, ‘This is beautiful, this smells beautiful, this is really beautiful,’” Lauder says. This is how the iconic fragrance got its name, Lauder says, calling her grandmother’s decision “wonderful and clever.”

“She was so brilliant in the way she marketed products and stories, and she said that there’s no such thing as an ugly bride, just a lazy bride,” Lauder says. “And she said, on your wedding day, you are the most beautiful, and everyone, no matter where you are in the world, on your wedding day, you really take the time to be the most beautiful and to wear a special fragrance. So she thought it was the perfect icon for the Beautiful fragrance—a bride. And it’s still, to this day, when we do a Beautiful fragrance campaign, it’s always a bride. It could be a bride in a more casual way, a bride with long hair, hair pulled back, a bride in a very simple white dress, a bride in a very traditional dress. That can vary, but the overall image is very consistent. So she was a brilliant marketer, and her concepts are still more relevant than ever before.”

Lauder uses rose in many of her scents for AERIN, too. Estée died at age 95 in 2004, when Lauder was in her early 20s. One of Estée’s other favorite flowers was the calla lily, and in her memory, the front hall of the home that used to belong to Lauder’s grandparents—a home that is today used for personal holidays and events, sometimes pertaining to Estée Lauder, the company—are decorated with calla lilies.

“She wore it on her wedding day in 1930,” Lauder says of the flower. “And there’s a really beautiful photograph of her that looks so timeless, and she’s holding this bouquet of lilies, which is actually quite unusual for a bridal bouquet. But we still always have lilies…in memory of her.”

“Flowers definitely play a very important role in the brand”

Living with Flowers goes beyond fragrances and talks about everything flowers, from floral wallpaper to centerpieces to floral arrangements across Lauder’s homes in New York City, Palm Beach and East Hampton to gardens to decorating with flowers, and so many stops in between. “I know there’s been many books about flowers, but I wanted to tell it through my eyes and through my vision,” she says. “And I thought when I started compiling all these beautiful images that I had worked on in the past 12 years since I launched my brand, I felt there was a real opportunity to talk about flowers in a different way.”

The book covers the language of flowers, the symbolism of flowers, and is “a mixture of anything floral, whether it’s a beautiful vintage gardening book or a flower brooch or flower wallpaper or beautiful moments in a garden,” Lauder says. “The book really represents all these different elements of living with flowers and enjoying flowers.”

As we talk, appropriately, Lauder sits in front of a backdrop of floral wallpaper. On her desk sits fragrance samples in various stages of development—a modification, she teaches me—which also covered her grandmother’s desk during her career. (“I always remember her with little lab samples like this on her desk,” she tells me.) Lauder grew up with flowers around her. Many fragrances have floral notes, especially those she personally creates. Does having this knowledge since her childhood give her an edge in the fragrance business? Well, it doesn’t hurt.

“I’m very authentic to who I am and what I love,” she says. “And flowers definitely play a very important role in the brand.”

“Fragrance allows you to escape”

Beyond fragrance, flowers end up in AERIN’s scented candles, too—and their candle collection is one inspired by different destinations, be it Nantucket or France. “So, yes, it does go into the brand in many categories,” she says.

When one thinks of flowers, perhaps flowers’ visual appeal first comes to mind, but the smell of flowers is just as strong as its appeal to the eye. Fragrance and scented candles did especially well for the brand during the pandemic, Lauder says, because their smell took people away from the confines of their homes and “allowed you to escape and dream,” Lauder says. “Fragrance allows you to escape. We have a fragrance called Mediterranean Honeysuckle, which is orange blossom and honeysuckle, and it makes you feel as if you’re sitting in the Mediterranean—this wonderful, fabulous place.”

That fragrance continues to be one of AERIN’s bestsellers, she says, because it’s like “sunshine in a bottle, just makes you feel as if you’re on holiday.”

The book not only talks about Lauder’s personal journey with flowers, but introduces to those who read it tips for how to explore their own journey with blooms.

“Flowers, I think, put a smile on your face,” she tells me. “With flowers—they give you so much joy, and they really don’t require that much work.”

One flower, she says, “will totally transform your desk or your vanity or your night table. Flowers really represent happiness to me, and life—and I think they just bring joy.”