The Aviation Aesthetic: A Visual History of Fashion and Flight in Vogue

In 1919, four years after the first commercial flight took place from St. Petersburg to Tampa, an uncredited Vogue writer decided to get creative with some fashion copy. The assignment? Spring hats. “All the best ideas of the Wright Brothers are translated into French idiom by this large hat from Bendel, made by Suzanne Talbot, which has the swoop of an airplane hanging in the blue in its wide free lines. It is made of tête de nègre and trimmed with a beige leather thrust through the crown on one side,” they wrote next to an illustration of an extravagant headpiece. (Commercial photography: not yet readily available!)

Little did the writer know she would be the first in a long line of Vogue scribes to be inspired by the aviation aesthetic. Over the past century (yes, century), flights and fashion have gone hand in hand in our pages. Sometimes they informed content: In the pre-internet and travel agent days, we’d publish airplane routes along with our travel stories so readers could figure out how to reach the glamorous locales we wrote about. Other times, they were a news story. When New York’s first airport opened in 1939—then called New York Municipal Airport, now known as La Guardia—we sent a model to pose in front of the terminal wearing a fur coat. Thirty years later, we did a photo shoot about the new “Chanel-ish” American Airlines uniforms, which the flight attendants wore on the inaugural transcontinental flights between New York and Los Angeles.

And more often than not, it was used as a glamorous backdrop. In the 1970s, we did a photo shoot where resort collection–wearing models strutted in front of prop planes in the Bahamas. That same decade, we captured a youthful Richard Chamberlain in the American Airlines lounge at JFK.

Then there’s the silent, stylish legacy. Just as the jet-set age forever changed the lives of Americans, it changed Vogue. Once confined to shooting Manhattan socialites in New York city in the static L-85 fashion of the war years, come the 1960s, commercial air travel allowed us to photograph supermodels like Veruschka wearing a Pucci minidress in Acapulco. The airborne journey felt just as exciting as the destination: “Locked in what may be deadly competition with the Braniff stewardesses (whose celebrated Pucci-designed uniforms she may covet, for all we know), the resourceful mannequin, Veruschka, appears to have won this round, hands up or down. She’s dressed in what has to be the most all-out Pucci outfit on the Acapulco circuit,” we wrote at the time.

Below, a visual history of fashion and flight in Vogue.