Virginia Postrel, over at her Deep Glamour blog, has interesting brief thoughts about how British Airways is attempting to revive its image by being glamorous. The video linked into here has shots of BA aircraft past and present, including that ultimate piece of aviation coolness, Concorde. The new billboard ads I see on the side of the London Underground go for this sort of feel, too. But as always with glamour, the trick is being able to achieve a certain willing suspension of disbelief, rather in the way that, as Postrel has noted elsewhere, people regarded Barack Obama as a glamorous politician. (So was JFK, unlike, say, Eisenhower, Truman or even Ronald Reagan, despite the latter’s Hollywood back-story).
BA is not the only airline to try for the glamour approach in its marketing. The new adverts by Virgin go for a slightly more raucous, fun-fun-fun! approach and it makes me wonder how some feminists must think of it as the ads are full of young, sexy-looking women in killer heels, slinky red uniforms and so on, while the pilots and other crew are all winking in a naughty fashion at the camera. The message seems to be: “Fly Virgin and you might just get away with a hangover or a phone number!” On the positive side, it certainly seems to be at odds with the neo-puritan killjoy mood of the moment, so kudos to Sir Richard Branson for that.
And these thoughts take us to the collision between the desire to project hopes and dreams onto something (an airline or a politician or actor) and the reality. Consider how the vacuous Obama sound-bite “Hope and Change” has now become an ironic tagline for many an Instapundit post, for example. And Postrel has given several talks, including this one at TED, about the glamour issue more broadly. (She also has a book coming out.)
This issue of aviation glamour reminds of something I wrote a while ago about the movie, The Aviator, based on the life of Howard Hughes. He played a huge part in the airline industry, of course. And here is another chance for me to talk about Aerotropolis, a fascinating book about aviation and the modern world.
Surely this epitomises the utter cluelessness of the government-lovers when it comes to economics and the nature of reality itself?
Businessmen want pretty girls serving them nice food in a comfortable airplane. They’ll pay money to get it, and when offered it will chose that over the alternatives
The politically correct lobby doesn’t want you to want that. They want you to want cheap, dirty aircraft staffed with butch lesbians. They’ll do their best to make sure this is all you can ask for without being shouted down, called sexist and if they’re feeling really nasty “capitalist”.
But what the customer really wants still sells products wherever it can slip through, despite political correctness.
The “right on” government luvvie project always strikes me as one massive tantrum that the world isn’t the way they wish it was – and we all have to live through the fallout.
I go out of my way to fly Singapore Airlines. The stews aren’t (and don’t act like) shriveled, old hags like those in North America and Europe.
The food is better too.
Want, but not have. Air travel is killing Mother Gaia!
I don’t think we have to worry about the glamour of pretty girls ever going away. At worst it only changes form. Skirts may get longer but pretty girls will still be pretty. Even in extreme cases.
Islam swaddles women from head to toe in the attempt to eliminate the effects of sexy women. Still, National Geographic prints a picture of one burqa clad woman with green eyes and a come hither glance and every middle eastern man who sees it falls in lust. (As confirmed by a single former Egyptian I currently work with. He swears every man in his Muslim congregation was wild about her.)
Personally, I am rooting for the women that feel it necessary that they be aloud to go around topless in New York. Maybe they can start protest marches to extend the practice to the downtrodden women in my neck of the woods.
Steve if it is famous National Geographic photo (Link) – she was 12 at the time and that’s just creepy as hell.
If not then I apologise.
Yes I agree it is creepy. Doesn’t alter my point.
Frankly, the whole swaddled in a tent thing pretty much ruins it for me. Fortunately, I have more to work with on a daily basis.
On a similiar note, my aging dad who is in his 70’s finds the whole modern porn thing of women shaving their lower deck creepy. He thinks it makes them look like prepubescent girls. When I point out to him that they are in fact adult women and not girls, his response is that pretending to be a little girl is still creepy. I don’t know how to respond to that.
I just hope western society doesn’t adopt an idealized “sexy” woman I find creepy by the time I am his age. I don’t have any illusions about my own say in the matter.