About 25 years ago, Leonard Lauder, the visionary beauty mogul and Estée Lauder chief executive who died on Father’s Day at age 92, had an epiphany. It was just after 9/11, and the United States was in turmoil and recession. Most things looked grim, except for one.
Lipstick sales, he noticed, were rising, just as they had in the past when times were bad, like in the Great Depression. Perhaps, he thought, women wanted to indulge in small luxuries when a downturn was coming. Perhaps lipstick could even be an economic indicator. Thus the term “the lipstick index” was born.
It was the beauty equivalent of the “hemline index,” the theory that when things were good, skirts got shorter — and it proved to be but one of the enduring ideas Mr. Lauder had first.
“He was the original influencer,” said John Demsey, the former president of MAC Cosmetics.
The eldest son of an entrepreneur mother, Mr. Lauder became a billionaire but ate the same thing for breakfast for years (one fat-free yogurt with a sliced peach and one thin slice of whole wheat bread), could deliver one-liners with a borscht belt sense of timing, and turned one brand into an entire luxury group before the giant fashion luxury groups existed.
He once said, “I see 10 years, 20 years ahead of everyone else.” It may sound egotistic or implausible, but in many ways he turned out to be right. Without Mr. Lauder, it’s possible we would not have Kylie Jenner’s Kylie Cosmetics or Hailey Bieber’s Rhode.
“The modern-day prestige beauty business simply would not exist in its current form” without Mr. Lauder, Mr. Demsey said.
He had an uncanny ability to understand just how satisfying the crisp snap of a powder compact could be (and if you didn’t get it, he would demonstrate). He knew that beauty tracked sociological trends. He predicted the intersection of science and skin care. He embraced the value of disruption. He recognized the metrosexual before the metrosexual had a name and introduced the first men’s prestige grooming and skin-care brand with Aramis.
“One of his first and greatest ideas was to bring Carol Phillips, a beauty editor at Vogue, to Estée Lauder to start Clinique with the dermatologist Norman Orentreich,” said Linda Wells, the former editor of Allure. “It started a move toward dermatologic credibility.” The Clinique ads, shot by the great photographer Irving Penn, treated the products, which looked as if they had come straight from a lab, like sculpture.
He clocked the rise of the makeup artist before anyone else and bought MAC Cosmetics. (The name is an acronym for Makeup Artist Cosmetics, and it started life behind the scenes of magazine photo shoots and backstage at catwalk shows.) He bought Bobbi Brown’s namesake line when it was only 10 lipsticks. And as he absorbed them into the Lauder fold, he let each brand stand on its own.
“I never had to try and act professional,” Ms. Brown said. When the head of the Lauder research and development lab wanted to produce Ms. Brown’s lipsticks rather than continue with the small lab she was using, Mr. Lauder said, “Absolutely not,” she remembered. “Women would know the difference and not love it the same,” he said. When she fretted about missing her kids because she had to work during the Oscars, he used his private plane to fly her home for dinner.
“He saw in MAC the way diversity and self-expression could be powerful,” Mr. Demsey said, signing representatives like RuPaul and K.D. Lang. “He really understood embracing new standards of beauty.”
According to Ms. Wells: “When I started Allure, most of the industry wasn’t looking forward to a journalistic approach to beauty coverage, which was usually cozy to the point of being fawning. But Leonard essentially said to me, ‘Bring it on!’ He told me he’d never cancel his advertising, and just about every other company did in those first few years of the magazine.”
In discussions of Mr. Lauder, the word “mentor” comes up again and again. So does “hero.” “Nearly half the global talent pool of this industry passed through the company,” Mr. Demsey said.
After Mr. Lauder stepped down as chairman of Lauder, he christened himself “chief teaching officer” and ran seminars for employees that included “Ten Commitments.” One was: If you have a good idea, don’t let anyone talk you out of it.
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
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