Lilly Pulitzer's Menswear Collection Launches With an Exhibit of Unseen Slim Aarons Photos
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Hold on to your huaraches: as part of its 65th anniversary, Lilly Pulitzer is dipping a pastel-painted toe into the world of menswear. After more than six decades of treating its devoted female fanbase to signature frothy prints across categories from womenswear and swim to home and gifts, Palm Beach’s most iconic lifestyle brand is finally giving the gents a fully full-fledged collection of their own.
The new mens range debuted at a VIP fashion show in Palm Beach last week, and will arrive in stores in February for the Spring 2025 season. While this is technically not the first time Lilly Pulitzer has delved into menswear, the new outing does represent a “revival” of sorts, according to Craig Reynolds, the company’s SVP Merchandising.
“Lilly’s family and especially her husband were inspiration for a lot of her ideas,” said Reynolds. “The business was born in Palm Beach and as Lilly grew, there were many men in Lilly’s life who wanted to be a part of the moment.”
Drawing on her personal experience and relationships made Pulitzer a pioneer of what it meant to be a lifestyle brand. Using fruit from the orange groves she and her husband Herbert Pulitzer owned in Florida, she opened a juice stand on Via Mizner in Palm Beach—and soon thereafter designed a lightweight, tropics-friendly, colorfully printed dress that could camouflage stains from working the juice press all day. Those punchy dresses started to outsell the juice—and her company was born in 1959.
A consummate socialite and hostess, Pulitzer’s lifestyle embodied her brand. The pool parties were legendary, and her connections to the era’s iconic women like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Whitney Vanderbilt catapulted her dresses into new stratospheres of success. Her brightly colored shifts became the de facto uniform of the Palm Beach set in the 1960’s and 70’s, and the name Lilly Pulitzer soon became synonymous with sun-drenched living in social South Florida.
It was during this earlier period in the company’s history that Pulitzer debuted a
collection of “Men’s Stuff” (as she called it) for the guys in her life to join in on the fun, but the category diminished and ultimately waned as her womenswear signatures found commercial success. The brand last dabbled in menswear once more in 2008 with a range of printed blazers and pants, but that, too, was ultimately phased out after a few seasons.
“We’ve since occasionally done a pocket square or a tie or a gift for men at the holiday season,” said Reynolds. “Our whole ethos is to be fun and whimsical and make people smile—and we think men should be able to enjoy that too.”
This collection differs from previous forays into the men’s realm not only in terms of scope, but in fit and fabrication as well. Pant legs are trimmer, and there’s a hint of stretch across the board. “Stretch and comfort is something ex pected of the garments people buy to-day,” said Reynolds, who also shared that future expansion of the men’s line might include performance fabrics, too. (Lilly-printed pickleball and golf attire, anyone?)
“Even our shifts didn’t used to have stretch but now they do. We’re really leaning into cotton-based fabrics that have some stretch for that ease and comfort. It’s all about evolving with your customer. That’s what happens when you’re 65 years old.”
What customers can reliably expect, as always, is signature Lilly prints, all of which are done exclusively in-house. And while they may be signature, the new men’s collection prints are, in fact, anything but new—many of them are inspired by Slim Aarons photographs of Pulitzer and her Palm Beach circle in the 1960’s.
To celebrate both the brand’s 65th anniversary and the menswear launch, Lilly Pulitzer has also sponsored a new exhibition of Slim Aarons photographs displayed alongside several one-of-a-kind archival Lilly Pulitzer pieces at the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens in Palm Beach. Slim Aarons: Gold Coast, open through January 26th, 2025, features dozens of Aarons’ celebrated works and ephemera that have never before been
seen in public. Several of the photographs include never-before-seen shots of Pulitzer herself—including one where Aarons ostensibly coaxed the camera-shy doyenne into frame during a pool party.
“We love the photos,” said Liza Pulitzer of the exhibition. “We think of them as family heirlooms.”
According to Shawn Waldron, the Getty Images curator who organized the exhibition, the world has seen only 5,000 of the 750,000 works in Aarons’ archive, which Getty owns. Much of the archive still exists in Getty’s storage facility in London, in the same boxes in which Aarons kept his photographs stored in his garage. So to find these intimate, candid glimpses into Pulitzer’s life is something of a needle in a haystack—and to unearth them in time for Lilly Pulitzer's anniversary feels all the more momentous, offering a voyeuristic glimpse into her world before social media.
“It all continues to work so well for the Instagram age because of the bright colors and it’s aspirational, but also very real and authentic,” said Waldron. “There are some celebrities of course, but you can tell these pictures are not heavily styled... It feels refreshing and unguarded in a way that doesn’t really exist anymore.”
While the Palm Beach of humble juice stands and unguarded celebrity pool parties has long since passed, Lilly Pulitzer designs have found enduring cultural resonance, and a permanent place in closets and country clubs from Palm Beach to Nantucket and beyond. For over six decades, women have been enjoying the sunshine and unfettered optimism of Ms. Pulitzer’s designs—and now, it’s the guys’ turn to take a walk on the bright side.
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