The iconic tailoring of flight attendant uniforms has inspired many designers

Jet-set chic is alive and well – at 35,000ft

Uniformed Qantas staff walk through Sydney domestic airport (AFP/Getty Images)

As we reach the conclusion of London Collections: Men, the first of four international fashion weeks devoted to what the male of the species may be wearing come next winter, I couldn’t help but think of… flight attendants. Specifically, female ones.

This is not some kind of prediction about men dressing as trolley dollies. It’s not even a notion that a jauntily-pinned scarf may become a masculine fashion must-have. It’s just that I see a lot more of them than usual over the next couple of months, with menswear butting schedules with womenswear, sliding straight into the spring haute couture shows in January, and a mere two week gap dividing that and the autumn/winter ready-to-wear shows in New York.

Then again, I can’t blame the peripatetic fashion calendar. I’ve always been fascinated by flight-attendant chic. Maybe the short-lived 1990s Scottish situation comedy The High Life is to blame; or that Jeremy Scott ensemble Britney Spears sports in the “Toxic” video; or maybe it was my exposure to the Emirates uniform at an early age – which, with its quasi Grace Jones swathed scarf snood, is universally acknowledged as the chicest of all airline sartorial statements. I maintain that last spring’s Atelier Versace collection was inspired, in part, by Emirates.

Plenty of designers are. The pre-spring collections of Miu Miu and JW Anderson both did duty, the former with boxy, brass-buttoned tailoring like Cristobal Balenciaga’s Air France uniforms from 1969, while the latter showed silk dresses in tonal stripes of airforce blue, olive and a particularly nasty hazelnut brown.

There’s something a bit perverse about flight attendant uniforms. They’re almost S&M – while travellers today consciously dress in easy-to-wear, elasticated stuff, flight attendants are trussed in tailoring.

Virgin Atlantic’s uniforms by Vivienne Westwood are a great example, where every detail has been considered, and a few over-designed. They look great, I think, but I wonder how comfortable they are on a long-haul flight? On my way to Japan in December, I asked one of the cabin crew: she responded with a wry smile. You couldn’t help but notice the staff tugging at the peplums on those too-fitted, back-vented jackets. Westwood’s clothes are rarely the easiest to wear on the ground, let alone at 35,000ft.

I also couldn’t help but wonder how quickly they would date – although, honestly, that’s part of the joy of the flight attendant uniform. It harks back to a different time, when people actually travelled in the kind of high-heeled shoes they may need to remove for the emergency slide, rather than in Uggs. Maybe flight attendants are the final bastion of the jet-set? Perhaps that’s why so many designers want us to dress like them?