Really Haute Couture explains how airlines are “trying to dress up their image with high-fashion uniforms” — and gives a bit of history:
In the infancy of air travel in the 1930s, many of the first stewardesses were registered nurses and wore severe, woolen-skirted suits. Air hostesses in pillbox hats became the stuff of pop culture.In 1965, the Jet Age took off. Braniff Airways, of Dallas, and its image consultant, Mary Wells, hired Emilio Pucci to dress the cabin staff in a modern, sexy look that Braniff called “the End of the Plain Plane.” With a canny eye on its predominantly male clientele, the airline called the variable wardrobe, which flight attendants could change before, during and after a flight, the “Air Strip.”
Soon the stewardess was as much a fashion icon as the jet-setters she served. British Overseas Airways Corp., the predecessor of British Airways, tried a single-use paper minidress on Caribbean routes in 1967 (and scuttled it after finding that male passengers would splash water on the dress to make it transparent). Budget pioneer Southwest Airlines filled its planes in the early 1970s thanks in part to flight attendants in miniskirts and go-go boots.