TITLE: Celebrating Wasp Style, A PRIVILEGED LIFE by Susanna Salk
Assouline Publishing, 170 pgs., $40
Text by Vivian G. Kelly
Image of C.Z. Guest by Slim Aarons, courtesy of Getty Images
Image of Babe Paley, photographer, unknown
The place: J. Crew on Elm Street, New Canaan, CT.
Timestamp: Saturday afternoon, June 16th
We could not have asked for a more ideal setting in which to meet Susanna Salk, the author of one of Asssouline’s latest coffee table books, A Privileged Life. Ms. Salk is the real deal, she looks and sounds like a WASP and she actually is one. Among her fondest memories is being driven home by her friend’s makeup-free Mom, still in her riding clothes in the family’s old Subaru with horsehair seats, listening to NPR.
This glossy coffee table book does-away with the “members only” rep WASPs tend to have and is the first book to really speak on the subject after Lisa Birnabach’s The Preppy Handbook, [1980, Workman Publishing Co, Inc.] which successfully portrayed the zeitgest of the era of excess.
As Ms. Birnbach’s book did in the eighties, Ms. Salk discusses the FEELING and emotion that the term WASP conveys. Ms. Salk’s book goes one better than Ms. Birnbach’s in that it covers the subject matter beginning with the forties through the present day.
We met up with Ms. Salk, who sat at a long white table in the front of the store, surrounded with shelves and racks spilling-over with WASP themed clothing and accessories, conversing with shoppers.
She surprised us by stating, “So many WASP icons like Grace Kelly are not in fact actually WASP.” Grace’s Father was a famous local sculls champion but as he was Catholic and a bricklayer, was not allowed to row in the Henley Royal Regatta, an esteemed WASP event.
Ms. Salk named the late C.Z. Guest as the penultimate WASP, whose loves included her garden, her home, and her dogs. She maintains that WASP has nothing to do with religion or money though. WASP, she explained, “is about timelessness, a surety that life will always continue in comfortable familiar patterns.”
It’s knowing that summers will be spent at the beach house, every year, meeting up with the familiar faces that are fixtures over a lifetime. It’s knowing that your hostess will welcome whatever friends you and your children bring-over for dinner.
This generosity extends across all demographics, but only the setting, food, drinks, and dress differ.
The idea that life will continue in the same way is a seductive and extremely appealing one particularly after the horrors of 9-11, which changed many peoples’ lives forever. Ms. Salk hit the bulls eye in the introduction, ”Maybe by sacrificing change, for consistency, the world feels like it’s a safer place. Control over one’s conditions is, after all, the ultimate privilege.”
Ms. Salk concluded our conversation by explaining that in some ways she wanted to do a book on this topic “ as someday, it will no longer eventually be there any more.”
In the meantime, WASP sartorial style keeps going strong, thanks in part to the availability of resources such as J. Crew, LL Bean, Orvis, and Lilly Pulitzer to name just a few, on the internet. The young make the formerly one-note style their own, by combining a full-on preppy hot pink polo with a pair of Abercrombie & Fitch or Juicy Couture Bottoms.
A Privileged Life makes for thought-provoking reading. It’s also chock-full of captivating images of idyllic locations that appear to be magically suspended in time. Those in it appear enveloped in an environment that cocoons them against the vissisitudes of the world. Many of the subjects are glamorous recognizable icons snapped while at leisure. Ms. Salk’s book makes a wonderful summer time gift, particularly if you should happen to be visiting in one of the idyllic locales photographed in the book.