Pauline Brown knows a lot about the power of aesthetics. All four of her grandparents were Holocaust survivors, and on both sides, her grandmothers were the ones who kept their families afloat – through fashion. As Pauline shares on her Substack, one grandmother made her way from Vienna to New York with her family, where she started a high-end children’s clothing line out of her kitchen, and the other made evening gowns in Cape Town that she sold to South Africa’s gentry.
It runs in her family, but Pauline has also refined her understanding of aesthetics through years of professional experience. Formerly Chair of North America for the luxury brand family LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton), she developed the concept of aesthetic intelligence – which she calls “the other AI” – and is the founder of a platform by that name that helps leaders build more enduring brands using this form of intelligence.
I recently had the great pleasure of sitting down with Pauline at the SiriusXM studios in NYC to explore how aesthetic and energetic intelligence are related. I was delighted by her invitation because, after reading her book, Aesthetic Intelligence: How to Boost It and Use It in Business and Beyond, I realized that aesthetics have played a major role in my energetic intelligence. Indeed, Pauline’s work has illuminated something I’d felt profoundly in my body but never fully recognized consciously: my nervous system is sensitive to the aesthetics in my environment, and one of the primary ways I’ve regulated myself for as long as I can remember has been through aesthetics.
My family and friends would likely roll their eyes at me for not putting this together sooner; they’ve lived with my fixation on perfect lighting, cozy textiles, and aesthetic order in my home and workplace. What Pauline helped me realize is how closely linked my aesthetic intelligence is to my energetic intelligence: to the best of my ability, I design the spaces around me to help me down-regulate and feel soothed. I started doing this intuitively from a young age. I’m a sensitive person and I run a lot of energy in my system; it’s hard for me to slow down. What helps me breathe more deeply and feel truly comfortable in a space has to do with both the energies that other people bring into it and the energy of the space itself.
I’m reminded of an exercise that a teacher led with a group of parents when our eldest daughter began first grade at a small school in central Vermont. She handed us a plastic toy to pass around. She instructed us to feel it, smell it, look at it, and note its weight, texture, and how it made us feel. Then she passed around a carved wooden toy and asked us to do the same. That moment alone reassured me that we’d made the right decision for our six-year-old daughter, at least for the time being: here was a place that carefully considered the aesthetics and energetics of a learning environment, leaning toward warm, gentle color tones, lighting, textures, and natural materials. My nervous system loved it.
Something as simple as noticing how the colors, the scents, and the textures in a room make us feel engages our whole body, especially the nervous system. The colors in a room are different wavelengths (or frequencies) of light reaching our eyes. We refer to some colors as “warm” and some as “cool” because of how they make us feel.
Consciously using our aesthetic intelligence and our energetic intelligence might lead us to design our spaces differently, when we have that privilege and capacity.
These two forms of intelligence, while distinct, overlap in important ways. For me, beauty isn’t just something to admire, though I do. It’s something I use to regulate myself. Seen this way, aesthetic choices are a form of energetic practice, carried out through light, texture, color, and order.
Aesthetic intelligence helps us perceive and create beauty; energetic intelligence helps us feel what that beauty does to our bodies. Together, they let us design spaces and lives that don’t just look good but feel right.
Pauline and I explored this and so much more in our conversation on her SiriusXM show, Aesthetic Intelligence. I hope you’ll listen to our conversation on Spotify. I’d love to hear your comments, below!
