Up in the air
5 Feb 2012
Copenhagen Fashion Week shows air hostess blue, Chanel launches couture on a plane. Pan Am proves how influential tv shows are. They don’t even have to be good.
As several collections bore testimony to on the runways of last week’s Copenhagen Fashion Week, Pan Am, the show about chic stewardesses, exudes it’s newfound power.
By Malene Birger celebrates the 1960s.
Big Danish brands By Malene Birger and Baum und Pferdgarten both paid a tribute to the late 1950s early 1960s and even sported outfits in Pan Am blue.
Air hostess chic updated by Baum und Pferdgarten.
“Nostalgia – i’ts delicate, but potent,” says Don Draper in the episode The Wheel, and so not only does he sell his idea for a campaign for Kodak’s new slide projector. He also explains the main attraction of Mad Men, that has launched a craving for all things 196os, particularly in the fashion world. But why Pan Am?
The CIA recruits from these babes in Pan Am. Might have worked if the show didn't use the spy thing for melodramatic love stories and to prove just how tough these chicks are.
Casting Christina Ricci, the forgotten teen star of the 1990s, and dusting off romantic comedy’s oldest premise with a blond ‘runaway bride’ who becomes an air hostess, might have worked.
Karl Lagerfeld showed Chanel couture on a plane a few weeks ago. Just saying.
But aside from the tired clichés, they call dialogue, it’s hard to believe the CIA, despite the troubled times of the Cold War, would have recruited these flight attendants and in every respect blueeyed chicks, as spies for their country. It might have worked, if the show wasn’t so desperate to be glamorous, in stead of authentic, like Mad Men. Pan Am reminds me of the romance magazines I used to read under the covers as a little girl, because they weren’t pc in the commune, were I grew up.
"Fashionable on any runway". The Pan Am Barbie from 1966, is now reproduced and writes the show's dialogue, it seems.
Pan Am has relatively high production value – it looks good. So would a Secret Agent Barbie, if Mattel would only make it.
Tv shows are so hot, they don’t even have to be good, to be trendsetters. Apparently, we go along for the ride. As long as they serve cocktails on board.
