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What a shame style got lost in transit…

Lucy Kippist

by Lucy Kippist

09 Jun 05:55am

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Filed under: Airport, Fashion, Style, Travel, Weekend Punch

25 comments

Martin Grant is bringing back something long lost to Australian airports – glamour. The Melbourne-born, Paris-based fashion designer, known for his sophisticated style has been commissioned to whip up a new batch of uniforms for Qantas hosties.

Airport chic:Beckham style

Grants’ will be the tenth incarnation of the national airline’s uniform since 1959, following designers like Yves Saint Laurent, Emilio Pucci, George Gross and Harry Who. His brief is simple: elegance and wearability, two words that have the ability to transcend any fashion disaster.

Pity this won’t extend to all travellers, because for us normal folk airports have become a den of excess, reckless eating and drinking and shopping for stuff we don’t need. In other words they’re a playground for slobs. And spoilt slobs at that who demand massages at midnight, gamble at dawn and drink beer with every meal.

Yes, airports are a hedonistic time warp where any sense of normality is eradicated by primitive desire or sheer want and need. It’s an experience best summed up by a friend’s Facebook update on the first leg of his recent overseas holiday:

Hash browns and Heineken. gotta love airport lounge breakfast [sic].

Who knows what makes those bright lights, white counters, fatty carbs and inflated prices so irrestible once you make it beyond the transit gates, but like anything that offers instant gratification, the airport experience is fleeting. Leaving you unsatisfied, feeling cheap, unwashed, hung-over and out of pocket.

American designer and writer Chappell Ellison blames poor design for our experience of the modern airport. She says air travel has lost the glamour of the 1970s jet-era, a period defined by Pan Am, modernism and “beautiful, clean structures that shunned ornament.”

And it’s been replaced with badly designed airports, desperately in need of renovation that smell of “lost luggage”. While out of date bathrooms and tacky public furniture have de-valued the travel experience so much that its barely worth getting dressed for.

Ellison says its bureaucracy: too many stakeholders wielding equal amounts of power over the management of American airports makes it impossible for designers to make permanent changes without fighting big business tooth and nail.

Yeah, okay that might sound good on paper, but we Aussies have nobody to blame for our slothful airport habits. As our own Ant Sharwood put is so eloquently here on The Punch a few months ago, airports are our secret shame.

They’re one of the only places in the world that we can by three bottles of scotch without looking like a dero, indulge in plane spotting or fork out $14 for a small carton of orange juice. But do we really have to do it all wearing trackie daks? 

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25 comments

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    • craig2 says:

      07:06am | 09/06/12

      No, I pay 14 bucks for my orange juice wearing CK jeans, Armani shirt, 300 dollar glasses and cane toad skin shoes, that way I get the full experience of feeling ripped off from the clothing I wear to that orange juice. Just trying to balance out my feelings of insecurity…....:-

      Reply

    • NESLIHAN KUROSAWA says:

      07:20am | 09/06/12

      Hi Lucy,

      Now, now!  There are airports and AIRPORTS, just as very stylish travellers and ordinary everyday travellers just wanting to get to their destination.  Most fun part travelling long distance especially from Australia to other parts of the world, is actually getting a true taste of transit or stop over airports.  Simply because the idea of flying non stop is very painful, indeed.

      Most outstanding airports for me personally, are located in Kuala Lumpur, Frankfurt and Dubai! We are talking about pure style and really expensive things to purchase as well. Does that mean that everyone travelling through can actually afford to purchase those things?  Absolutely not!  However, when you are trying to get to your destination in a hurry and get together with your loved ones, this happens to be one of the last things on your minds.

      With some of us actually finding the time and the money needed for travelling in the first place, wearing designer label clothes and having stylish luggage to go with all that seem to matter a little, in my opinion. Most important thing happen to be getting to our destination safe and sound, right?  All the other exciting and fun things to do once we get there!  Kind regards to your editors.

      Reply

    • basmati says:

      07:52am | 09/06/12

      I wore a collared polo shirt on a domestic flight last year. I felt totally over dressed amongst the hordes of passengers clad in thongs, t-shirts and ‘stubbies’ shorts.

      Reply

    • TracyH says:

      08:29am | 09/06/12

      We all just know that catching a plane is like catching a bus. Would you expect haute couture on a bus? Really, we Aussies are way above the trap of putting on airs.

      Reply

    • rudy says:

      06:06pm | 09/06/12

      No-one is talking about putting on airs, but about putting on some halfway decent clothes when going to an airport, shopping centre, and above all, to work. I’m tired of Aussie slobs and their excuses for being too lazy to dress with any style.

    • Ginger Mick says:

      09:20am | 09/06/12

      They just aint got no couth

      bless their little souls

      Bet the attire in biz class is better   grin

      Reply

    • stephen says:

      10:26am | 09/06/12

      Airtravel was once very expensive and passengers dressed up because the journey was as much fun as the destination, but now the thong wearers do a bit of boasting as if they travel often and the plane is just like their lounge room, they are familiar with new places and they get bored often ... which is why they travel.

      Folk, generally, lead boring lives, and now they get bored somewhere else.

      Reply

    • thatmosis says:

      10:42am | 09/06/12

      My wife and I always dress comfortably but well when travelling long haul and this has paid off more than once when we were upgraded to business several times, free. The common traveller in their tracky dackies and thongs were left to wonder why and its simple, dress to impress and good things come your way. As for buying in airports that’s a no no and any traveller worth their salt knows that airports are the rip off centres of any city

      Reply

    • Scotty Mac says:

      11:31am | 09/06/12

      Thank goodness someone has been hired to replace the boring rubbish that is called a Qantas uniform. It looks like something a char lady would wear to cover the gravy stains. Army greens looks better than what they have been wearing for some time now. As for the passengers, they are the ones that have been dummied down by the Labor party and their lack of toilet training at home and school. If we are fortunate we may see a “new” generation that is toilet trained, but I will continue to take my peg and tea tree oil on my Qantas flights.

      Reply

    • Pina says:

      01:35pm | 09/06/12

      The current Qantas uniform looks like something a cane-toad chucked up. It represents Olympics 2000 style ie. busy, awkward colours and Sydney’s general lack of taste led by designers who are hellbent on injecting tacky, sentimental Australiana into their outifts. It demonstrates everything that’s tired about Qantas. To the crew’s credit, they hate it. The Melbourne-born, Paris based designer of the new ones gives us hope, but please for godsake lay off the Aboriginal motifs or any other archetypally Australian theme. Given the uniforms will probably be made in China, please also get the small-minded procurement people out of the project to avoid beating the price down to the point the the quality matches that of goods found in a 2 dollar shop. We’re not reknowned for our dress sense down under for nothing, so here’s a chance to show the world we gracefully accept we don’t have a sense of style.

    • Philip says:

      12:07pm | 09/06/12

      It’s called “Cattle Class” and you are treated exactly like that!

      Reply

    • rudy says:

      06:08pm | 09/06/12

      But that’s no reason to act like that.

    • Bogans Reign says:

      12:48pm | 09/06/12

      The Beckham’s appear like wonderful people until you hear them speak, it is only then that you realise they would be more at home in Queensland!

      Reply

    • Dr Iva Stetha-Scope says:

      01:50pm | 11/06/12

      This is our first example of what I like to call The Sycophant Madness. It usually affects (paid up) members of political parties as they try and pass blame for any loss at an election, onto others who don’t vote or share the same ideals as they or their parties do, through the use of derogatory comments be it against one person, or as in this case, a whole state.  I look forward to explaining this strange and self destructive but delusional ailment using the posts of other Punch commentators in other articles.

    • Sara Somewhere says:

      01:53pm | 09/06/12

      The thing that has always amused me is airlines inability to follow safety recommendations when dressing their cabin crew. Recommendations provided by CASA state that for safety fliers should wear loose clothing made from natural fibers and flat leather shoes, and until a few years ago most airlines echoed these recommendations on their own websites (few do anymore). Meanwhile, what do flight attendants wear? Polyester dresses, nylon stockings, and high heels. I’ve never been able to work out why flight attendants are dressed like secretaries for such a physical job.

      In general, what I wear when flying falls within business casual—work pants, tunic top, ballet flats. I wouldn’t be seen dead in tracksuit pants outside my house.

      Reply

    • Anna says:

      08:19am | 10/06/12

      Spot on Sara.
      They are dressed in such a dated fashion.
      Come to think of it, why are secretaries dressed like secretaries?
      Australian flight attendants should be dressed in flats like Campers, Australian Merino wool (they might have some of that already) and other natural fibres as you say.
      And they should leave the cologne and perfume (and this includes the male FAs) at home. It’s not comfortable for passengers to inhale that in an enclosed space.

    • M says:

      07:15am | 11/06/12

      Maybe not for you women, but I love the smell and sight of a well groomed air hostess. I fly Qantas for work but when I’m paying I fly Virgin, cause the air hostesses are hotter. God bless Branson.

    • jase says:

      10:47am | 11/06/12

      They are the front line image of an airline, they should be dressed to be aesthetically pleasing. Something we seemed to lose the ability to do beyond the 70’s.

      Any employee who is in view of the public and you customers should look attractive, regardless of the industry.

    • Ben says:

      02:50pm | 09/06/12

      I couldn’t care less what my fellow passengers wear, provided that their clothes are clean and that they practise basic hygiene.

      What I do object to is people like the slob at the terminal next to me in the Brisbane Qantas Club yesterday. It’s bad enough people feel the need to eat while using a public computer; it’s another when Mr Salami, Cheese and Olives was chomping loudly away and putting his greasy hands all over the keyboard. Pig.

      Reply

    • M. says:

      07:17am | 11/06/12

      Oh dear, you poor thing. How dare anyone eat and surf the net at the same time. The uncouth slobs!

    • Robert S McCormick says:

      04:05pm | 09/06/12

      Qantas Chief, Alan Joyce, has been crying poor, seemingly, ever since he got his highly-paid, even higher Bonused job a QF. He has destroyed or eliminated 1000s of Australian jobs. He even went so far as to ground QF, thereby inconveniencing 10s of 1000s of passengers & losing an equal number of future ones. We are told that QF’s profits are on a slippery slide to nothing. The share price has totally collapsed, doubtless the next thing Joyce will advise is that he is suspending Dividend payments to shareholders. Doubtless he will wangle a pay increase & a multi-million dollar Bonus for himself.
      Now we are told he is splashing out on new uniforms for QF hosties! A fat lot of good that will do when there are no bloody passengers on QF’s new, multi-billion dollar fleet which he has announced in recent times & uses these new aircraft as an excuse to sack hundreds of Australian workers employed in QF’s Maintenance workshops
      Though it is now, thanks entirely to Joyce, a distant memory QF was once one of the world’s best airlines. Australia was, rightly, very proud of it. Today it is but a shell. We would not fly QF today because we do not believe those aircraft are being serviced & maintained properly. QF has been appallingly managed over the past few years. The current management remind me of the appalling & appallingly expensive management which the former Coles-Myer Group imported to manage the Myer Department Stores. Myer, one of the greatest Retail Operations of the World damn-near went to the wall thanks to the disastrous Senior Management For some weird & wonderful reason the sole instrument of that near collapse on being sacked walked away with a reported $16 million severance pay.
      Will we see the same with the Senior Management of QF? That management, just like the former Myer one, has been a complete disaster.
      Alan hop down off your throne in your ivory tower, join the real world and, stop squandering what tiny profits you have managed to salvage & start providing decent Service, decent Food, decently maintained aircraft for we don’t really care whether the Hosties are dressed by Paris, K-Mart, Target, Target Urban or Big W!

      Reply

    • jase says:

      11:35am | 11/06/12

      The problem is that the plan is to destroy QF, that is the aim of the game by the board. The strategy looks a little like this.

      1) Start low cost carrier with low cost base - Jetstar.
      2) Subsidise low cost carrier to make Qantas look as unprofitable as possible.
      3) J* starts to cannibalise QF routes.
      4) QF Break up.
      5) J* will bring in a “business class” to take remaining premium travellers.
      6) QF closes up shop because it is “not profitable”.

      Look at the allocation of aircraft going to QF Group, almost every new aircraft is being delivered to J* unless its the A380. They are utilising old 747/767 fleet on the city flyer services and the passengers are not impressed.

    • Meh says:

      08:51am | 11/06/12

      You have a better eye than me
      If you can tell a travellers country by their livery
      More likely you are just a snob
      Of people being able to fly for two bob
      I don’t think we will cure societies ails
      By wearing top hat and tails

      Reply

    • James says:

      11:27pm | 11/06/12

      “Dero”, love it, haven’t heard it in ages. A good bellyache late at night smilesmile:):)

      Reply
 
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