What is Aesthetic Intelligence and why does it matter in our leadership styles? How can our self-expression become an essential part of our identity and leadership?
At the latest OLEADA Lounge, we were thrilled to explore these questions with former LVMH Chairman and author of Aesthetic Intelligence, Pauline Brown, and OLEADA’s very own co-founder and Creative Director, Tiffany Zhou. The event brought together professional women for a fireside chat about aesthetics, leadership, and authenticity in both life and business.
About Pauline Brown
Pauline Brown, formerly the Chairman of North America at LVMH Moët Hennessy-Louis Vuitton, is a longtime leader in the luxury goods sector. She currently is an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, where she teaches a course on the Marketing of Aesthetics and Experiences. She also is the author of the best-selling book Aesthetic Intelligence and the founder of the strategic advisory firm Aesthetic Intelligence Labs.
**Please note that the transcript has been edited for clarity and length.**
Tiffany Zhou:
Pauline, in your book, you mentioned, "If you see aesthetics as merely appealing to the superficiality of consumerism or the whims of fashion, please hear me out." I actually get this a lot, especially when pivoting from banking to fashion. My old colleagues would often make comments "Oh, fashion, that’s just brainlessly superficial.". Is "Aesthetic" just another word for beauty?
Pauline Brown:
I hate to get defensive, but this is a false construct. The fashion industry is almost $2 trillion a year, and it does employ a lot more women. I cite that number to say that if this were trivial, it wouldn’t nearly be as weighty in its volume, in its timelessness. Why is fashion as big as it is? It isn’t like food, which is an essential good. It is actually more essential than is credited in every culture, even pre-commercial ones. People have a need to adorn themselves at every socioeconomic level, every time in history, every corner in the world. [...] Every person on this planet has clothes, right? There are many people who forego eating meat or having a car. I don’t know anybody who foregoes getting dressed.
Fashion and choices around that are about identity, how we experiment with our voice and our customs. And so, the reason I get a bit defensive when an entire industry gets marginalized like that is: 1) I think it dismisses the actual value of that industry, and 2) I think that it is one that women, by and large, understand and embrace more immediately and more powerfully, and therefore this industry gets deprioritized.
Tiffany Zhou:
That’s a great point. Personally, I had a hard time learning the value of aesthetics, as I came from an engineering background and later moved into technology, consulting, and eventually banking. Everything revolved around data and modeling. I think, Pauline, you had a similar experience. You mentioned your first conversation with the COO of Estée Lauder after leaving Bain & Company. Can you share that career-pivoting story? I believe many of the professional women here will resonate with that experience.
Pauline Brown:
Yes, of course. The first thing I’ll caveat is that I came into this appreciation for aesthetic intelligence later in my career. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, and attending business school in the 90s, I learned professionalism as impersonal, which often made people invisible. At conferences, everyone in navy suits blended in, and it took effort to see who they really were. I now believe it’s better when people express themselves boldly, though not everyone needs to go as far as someone like Iris Apfel. Adding personal touches, like wearing something from my grandmother, became important to me. This mindset shift happened when I joined Estée Lauder, a design-driven company where style matters. Take red lipstick, for example: Chanel's and Revlon’s may serve the same function, but we pay more for Chanel because of its aesthetics. This principle should apply to all businesses, not just fashion and beauty. Leaders like Steve Jobs and Howard Schultz understood this and redefined their industries through aesthetics.
Tiffany Zhou:
For industries that are not fashionable or brand related, how can they implement aesthetic intelligence in this way?
Pauline Brown:
The most obvious expressions of aesthetics are campaigns, product design, a store design, etcetera, but there are a lot of less obvious design decisions that get made that tell a customer or an employee or partner what you stand for.
I worked at the Carlisle Group, a private equity group. It was fiercely competitive. It still is probably more today than when I was there. But, I looked at some of our head to head competition, like Blackstone and KKR and Apollo and so forth, and they were all recruiting people from the same handful of universities. So who they were attracting is not that different. They're all doing the same math, and the color of their money is the same, right? The dollar spent by one is pretty much that same commodity dollar spent by another. There's no difference there.
So what's the difference? And if I were a recruit with lots of choices, why would I pick one or the other? The answer all comes down to style. That's the only differentiator. And the style of each of those firms is very much a manifestation of who founded them and what they believed and how they communicated. And they tend to attract people who share those values and that ethos. And so I even tell people, when you're interviewing for a job, it's really hard to get your arms around the culture of the place. That's really hard to assess, because we're meeting one or two people and you're getting a snapshot. But it's not that hard to assess some of the other sorts of visual, tactile, and even auditory cues that are there that you would be living with day-in and day-out if you work there. So I pay attention to that – good aesthetics are not just about a good image. It's really about a good, honest expression of the inner value system. And it's everywhere you look.
Tiffany Zhou:
So let’s talk about leadership. Since we have so many female leaders here, can they use aesthetic intelligence in their leadership?
Pauline Brown:
Yes, it can absolutely help. It can undermine it too, if not done well. [...] Good taste, to me, is about first of all, knowing what appeals to you, having the discriminatory power to speak up, and continuing to work at it and evolve. There's a combination of imagination and envisioning and curation that needs to happen. I think of it like a muscle. If you don’t use it it will atrophy. If you feel that you’re expressing who you are in an authentic and comfortable way, people will respond to that. People respond. You can be a commandant and tell people what to do and they'll do it but that’s not leadership to me. That's a dictatorship. Real leadership is getting people to want to follow you, and they want to follow you because they see you, they respect you, because they want to be part of something. They want to be inspired by it and borrow from it. Maybe they want to exchange with it, and that’s incredibly important.
Tiffany Zhou:
Absolutely. A few years ago, I attended many women’s empowerment events, and I found myself in rooms full of women wearing navy and grey suits, talking about inequality in their work life in a passive, yet aggressive way that didn’t resonate with me. It felt aggressive and not aligned with the kind of leader I wanted to be. Then I read Pauline’s book, and something clicked for me. Authenticity became my guiding principle. I realized that leadership isn’t about conforming to an external idea of what power looks like. It’s about owning who you are, both personally and professionally. And that’s why I want to ask you: why do you think authenticity is a key to everything?
Pauline Brown:
Authenticity is essential because people can sense when someone is being inauthentic. It’s even more acute today, in this age where we have so many ways of triangulating what people are telling us and examining the credibility of it. So you have to either own you who are, or be exposed for being deceptive. That’s your choice. There are many good performers out there, but lives are long. Careers are long. Real relationships are long. And leading with deception doesn’t build strength. It doesn’t build long-term power. So I don’t even look at it as an option.
The risk that you run by being different and being authentic, and this is the risk that I took in the late 90s, is that you make people uncomfortable by being different, and you have to be able to live with that. That is the one challenge, I’d say, particularly for women, is to stop apologizing and accommodating. It reduces us to a shadow of who we can be. The price you pay by asserting yourself, by taking chances and being seen, is that you can be lonely at times. It is going to threaten some people. You have to be willing to accept that in order to have the advantages on the other side. And so I’ve never looked back.
Tiffany Zhou:
That’s why I’ve been thinking about my life and how I have changed. The moment I started being myself, the people around me embraced who I am and those who aligned with my values began to follow my brand. That’s why I also think there’s no single stereotype of a female leader in this world right now. The only way we can make it more like ourselves is to BE ourselves, right?
Pauline Brown:
I mean, I will say we’re making progress. People are much kinder towards the archetype of Kamala than they were to Hillary just a few years ago. And I don't think it's simply because Kamala is a woman of color. I think we're progressing with who we are giving permission to speak up, and with each dent that we make in our culture we’re redefining what power can look ahead and feel like. We're just more and more accustomed and accepting to diverse voices, even over the past decade. I look at the difference between the profiles in this room now and when, if I were sitting in your shoes some 20 years ago, what I might have felt in the room and how people might have appeared: the engagement, the conversation, the level of intimacy that we're having, is something I probably wouldn't have seen 20 years ago in such a professional setting. So I do feel we're making progress.
Tiffany Zhou:
That is exactly why I started OLEADA. In private equity, I was immersed in rooms full of men, and felt I was not really able to express myself. I wanted to change that, and start a brand that empowered change in the professional world. Yes, we focus on functional design, but our core values focus on bringing more gender balance to the professional world.
Pauline Brown:
I love what you're saying, Tiffany. If we just want a bag to put our things in, I could get you one for free at the supermarket. It might not be the best, but it works. We spend so much time thinking of functionality, but functionality is such a small piece of what a brand should really be promising. To me, that's entry stakes, the fact that you can actually close the top and you can carry the weight, etcetera. But it's the idea behind the brand, which in your case is about fit and empowerment and a certain originality and style, and that is what brings The Brand to life. And that's what I would say for anyone there who's either working for a branded company or thinking about creating one, think about: what's the idea behind it? What's the feeling that you try to evoke?
Tiffany Zhou:
Exactly. My mission to make the professional world more balanced through intentional design with OLEADA has created a lot of emotional value around the products we make. Like what you said in your book: delight is the most important thing that brings long-lasting value to a brand. It took me four years to understand this, because when I started my brand, I focused all on functionality, because I'm an engineer. But later, I realized that emotional value is the premium of the brand.
Pauline Brown:
Yes – as much as we as human beings have individual tastes there's one thing we share: our seeking of delight, aesthetic delight. Particularly in the stressful times as we're living through, I think that need for delight becomes even more acute.
The evening’s conversation reminded us that aesthetics are far more than just appearances—they shape the way we engage with the world and the people in it. Pauline Brown’s insights on Aesthetic Intelligence reinforced the idea that when we take the time to thoughtfully consider the design of our brands, our leadership styles, and our environments, we can create experiences that resonate deeply with others.
Authenticity and aesthetics are not just accessories to leadership—they are at the core of what makes a brand, and a leader, memorable. As Pauline so powerfully stated, “Real leadership is getting people to want to follow you because they see you, respect you, and want to be part of something bigger.”
At OLEADA, we are proud to continue the journey of empowering women to bring their full selves to the workplace. Through intentional design and authentic leadership, we believe we can redefine what professionalism looks and feels like for women everywhere.
Special thanks to our partners at M.M.LaFleur for hosting this engaging and inspiring evening at their stunning UWS store, and to Veronique Gabai for sponsoring our gift bags with their lovely fragrance samples. To all the women who joined us, thank you for your thought-provoking questions and participation. We look forward to continuing these discussions and sharing more moments of inspiration in future OLEADA Lounge events.