A Thread about fashion design at 40,000 feet
Airline uniforms from Vivienne Westwood, Emilio Pucci and more
On Saturday I spent 11 hours at Heathrow airport. I was flying Virgin from London to NYC, and what began as a 30-minute delay ballooned into 8.5 hours of roaming the airport, wondering if the flight would ever take off.
Luckily, the situation was sweetened by an apologetic upgrade to Upper Class. Great! I thought. I can just go luxuriate in the lounge.
Not so fast. Turns out you can only use the lounge if you’re the real deal - plebeian pretenders like me still have to sit on a plastic bench outside Pret where we belong. As I began the walk of shame from the lounge entrance back down the glass staircase to normie-land, a display caught my eye. It was a series of mannequins showing Virgin Atlantic’s uniforms through the ages.
Did you know that Vivienne Westwood designed the current outfits? I didn’t. She succeeded John Rocha (Simone Rocha’s dad), who created uniforms for the airline in 1999, updating his design again in 2004.
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Dame Viv took up the mantle in 2014, reworking the airline’s famous red womenswear ensemble with her signature hourglass tailoring and a new fabric, partly made of recycled plastic bottles. She also added a shiny red bag to replace the formerly grey iterations (although nothing beats Arabella Pollen’s lipstick belt from the first design in 1984).
In honour of Dame Viv’s new uniform, Virgin threw a huge party to celebrate. Debbie Harry performed wearing the suit’s red jacket. Here she is with Vivienne and Virgin founder Richard Branson (pretty sure the other guy is Andreas Kronthaler, Vivienne’s partner in life and art):
Another memorable designer/ airline collaboration was Emilio Pucci at Texan airline Braniff in the 1960s. He was appointed as part of a rebrand titled ‘The End of the Plain Plane’, led by designer Alexander Girard and pioneered by advertising executive Mary Wells Lawrence.
The gargantuan project saw Girard introduce a new ‘jelly bean fleet’ where each plane was painted a different colour, with shades ranging from baby blue, orange, yellow and lavender. “You can fly with us seven times and never fly the same color twice!” announced a TV ad at the time.
As for Pucci’s uniforms, they epitomised swinging 60s style. Flight attendants were renamed ‘air hostesses’ and wore a variety of ensembles covered in psychedelic prints, with striped calfskin boots by Beth Levine. Pucci even designed transparent, bubble-like headpieces called ‘Rain Domes’ which were intended to protect their carefully coiffed hairdos. These were scrapped within a month after proving both impractical and unnecessary - it was difficult to store them on the aircraft, and the domes cracked easily.
Another memorable moment in Pucci’s airline era was the ‘Air Strip’ campaign. This was focused on another of the designer’s fashion innovations, a layered uniform in which the female flight staff would remove different items of clothing during the flight, transforming their look for every stage of the journey. The collection was accompanied by cheeky print and TV ads featuring predictably Mad Men-era sexual innuendos.
Whilst Pucci was bringing his flirty flamboyance to Braniff, Air France were more concerned with building their reputation for serious runway fashion. In 1969, Spanish couturier Cristobal Balenciaga debuted his first uniform for the airline, replacing Christian Dior’s 1963 designs (these were designed by Marc Bohan, who succeeded Yves Saint Laurent as Dior’s creative director, and went on to spend nearly three decades at the house).
Unlike Pucci’s lively, space age aesthetic, Balenciaga took cues from the origins of air travel. The first female flight attendant was a nurse called Ellen Church, who began working for Boeing Air Transport in 1930. At that time, all flight attendants were registered nurses. Flying was still very new, and so wearing their uniforms was a reassuring gesture to soothe nervous passengers.
Cristobal took his appointment very seriously, opening an Air France department at Balenciaga’s HQ. According to SFO Museum, Cristobal couldn’t bear the idea of poorly tailored uniforms, and so insisted on individual fittings with the staff. His neat suits are crisp and professional - not a sky high striptease in sight.
Another great designer who turned his hand to airline uniforms not once but twice is French couturier Christian Lacroix (perhaps he got some inspiration from the legacy of Emilio Pucci, where he served as creative director from 2002 to 2005).
Like Balenciaga and Dior before him, he was first tapped by Air France. In 1990, the airline had acquired the domestic airline Air Inter and rival international airline UTA (Union de Transports Aériens). Lacroix was tasked with creating a new uniform that “personified this coming together of worlds and cultures”. He designed a collection of around 100 pieces that could be combined in different ways, debuting on board in 2005.
These uniforms seem subdued compared to the extravagant, baroque aesthetic of his own line, but they succeeded in creating a unified look that represented typical French elegance. They also caught the eye of China Eastern, who later employed Lacroix to design their uniforms. His new look, which launched in 2018, blends Parisian elegance with Chinese motifs to express the “simple, beautiful and dignified” tastes of Shangai fashion.
But whilst other airlines cycled through new designers and uniforms every few years, there’s one carrier for whom their uniform has become a signature, worn by female members of the flight crew for over 50 years.*
In 1974, another French couturier, Pierre Balmain, created Singapore Airlines’ sarong kebaya. The design features a traditional Batik in different colours to represent the various ranks amongst the crew.
Another honourable mention goes to one of my favourite airlines, Qantas, who have an impressive hitlist of designers in their archive. In 1975 they followed Brainliff’s lead by employing Emilio Pucci to design their uniforms (albeit slightly tamer than his wild Brainliff creations). Pucci was then succeeded by none other than Yves Saint Laurent, who designed for Qantas in the 80s.
The design I love most, though, is their current womenswear uniform, a simple shift dress with bold block coloured stripes, designed by Martin Grant in 2013.
If any of you are wondering at this point - yes I did eventually make my flight, and am now writing this from my hotel room in NYC. An honourable mention, then, to the city’s designer darling Zac Posen, an Anna Wintour favourite who came up in the 2000s making gowns for celebrity girlies. After closing his label in 2019, last year he was appointed as the creative director of Gap (his role also includes that of Chief Creative Officer at Old Navy). This isn’t his first foray into all-American design, though.
In 2016, he unveiled new uniforms for Delta, dressing over 60,000 of their staff in pieces created in collaboration with Wisconsin-based retailer Land’s End. The best part has to be the names - Posen created a new colour palette for the airline, including the shades ‘Passport Plum’, ‘Cruising Cardinal’, ‘Groundspeed Graphite’, ‘Skyline Slate’ and ‘Traveling Thistle’.
My final case study is close to my heart - good old British Airways. Over the past few years, the brand have become famous for their advertising campaigns, created with Uncommon agency, who they began working with in 2022. In 2023, they revealed a new suite of uniforms designed by the iconic British-Ghanaian designer and Savile Row fixture Ozwald Boateng.
Boateng spent five years working on the collection, which includes tunics, hijabs and jumpsuits for female cabin crew. According to the Guardian, the pieces were tested in deluge showers and freezers at -18C, to ensure their durability in extreme conditions. Whether or not that includes 11 hours pacing around Heathrow, I don’t know!
*I’ve deliberately focused on womenswear uniforms in this piece - mostly because the menswear designs are quite dull!
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Threads of the week
I’m in NYC! Hit me up if you want to hang. I’m wearing a Marc Jacobs t-shirt I bought at MJ’s ‘Stuff’ store the first time I ever visited the city 16 years ago. The skirt is a Spiral Boxer Skirt from Dauan Jacari, who were guests on the Threads of Conversation podcast back in January. Shoes, you already know. Bag is an old Issey Miyake dupe from COS.
Loose Threads
On about my 6th hour in the airport, in a state of ‘What Would
Do?’ I decided to do a tour of the luxury stores and see what they were peddling. I discovered that almost all of them were selling some version of this rococo floral and/or a geometric print in baby pink and blue. There’s something about this aesthetic that I find deeply unnerving, in a White Lotus kinda way. It’s too sugary to be trusted...
More plane content: whilst obviously my favourite part of the upgrade was a flat bed in which to sleep after 11 hours trudging around Terminal 2, a close second were these tiny plane-shaped salt and pepper shakers. I put them on my Instagram story and everyone asked if I took them - the answer is no, but someone did. Virgin still managed to have the last laugh, though.
OK one more thing from my flight - my mum pressed this book into my hands before my trip, saying it was brilliant. I’m not too far into it yet (preoccupied by themed silverware) but this slim little novel tells the story of six astronauts floating in outer space. It’s beautifully written, and very meta if you read it whilst hurtling through the sky.
I also watched this documentary, which was riveting.
Start your own Thread
Which airline design is your favourite? Any great ones I missed? Would you have pocketed the salt and pepper shakers??
Emirates have the classiest uniforms in my opinion. When you see them it is like seeing a beautiful show.
Braniff airlines is my Roman empire