Fashion
Palm Beach Society Goes On, With and Without Trump
At a pair of benefits on this exclusive island, many well-heeled guests were holding their tongues when it came to politics.
Just barely visible in the evening sky on Feb. 28 was an exceptional planetary alignment, with Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune all stacked up in a row for the last time until 2040.
Far below the celestial conga line, on a slender barrier island on Florida’s east coast, another kind of rare spectacle was underway. Many of the world’s wealthiest people had gathered in a clear-walled tent for the annual dinner dance hosted by the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach. With so many well-heeled guests in one place, the scene resembled a billionaire mosh pit.
There, among the creeping vines and spiked agave plants, stood Robert Wood Johnson IV, the pharmaceuticals heir, owner of the New York Jets and former ambassador to the Court of Saint James.
There, the financier Peter Soros was chatting with Pepe and Emilia Fanjul, the Cuban-born couple whose family-owned sugar cane farms sprawl across 190,000 Florida acres and whose annual Christmas card, in the form of a directory, is a foundational document of Palm Beach social life.
And there, in a chic white column dress, was Aerin Lauder, the businesswoman whose cousin, William, a former chair of Estée Lauder, recently unloaded two waterfront lots in Palm Beach for nearly $200 million. Unlike those guests whose fortunes had been newly minted in technology, health care, banking, entertainment or logistics, Ms. Lauder came by hers the old-fashioned way. She inherited it.
If it is true that the rich are always with us, it is also the case that nowadays they are less often among us. Increasingly, the American superrich glide through their existences in friction-free passage from gated communities to private jets, yachts and island enclaves like this one, a home base for Donald J. Trump since 1985.
