When airlines seek restyled uniforms, ETA is years away
NEW YORK: Long ago, airline uniforms reflected the glamour of flight. Now, they have to serve more utilitarian needs. Do they reflect the airline’s image? Will they look good on most everyone? And, perhaps most important, are they comfortable?
Several domestic airlines have been wrestling with the answers to those questions as they redesign uniforms that, in some cases, were last updated decades ago.
For American Airlines, which introduced new uniforms in September, the different look was an important step in conveying a unified brand image since its merger with US Airways in 2013.
“There was a visual difference in what people were wearing, and I think, inherently, that kind of creates a barrier,” said Brady Byrnes, the airline’s director of global marketing.
After the rollout of the new uniforms, he said, “you could just feel a shift.”
People who work on airline uniform designs say it’s common for the process to take two or three years, sometimes longer.
Ekrem Dimbiloglu, director of airport customer experience for Delta Air Lines, agreed that “there’s a very long lead time associated with producing garments.”
In 2015, Delta tapped fashion designer Zac Posen to develop its new uniforms, which will be rolled out to around 60,000 employees next year. “It’s a million-plus garments,” Dimbiloglu said.
One reason the new designs take so long is that airline uniforms, unlike ordinary work clothes, have to be multifunctional.
“When you look at a flight attendant dress, it just looks like any other dress,” Byrnes said.
In reality, both the cut and the fabric have to accommodate a range of motion, from hoisting bags into the overhead bins to crouching down in the galley.
“It’s a very physical job. It has to bend and stretch and move,” Byrnes said of the uniforms. “The fabrication is extremely important. We really did a lot of extensive testing in fabric, by adding a little bit of a stretch.”
Materials that make movement easy were also a top priority for Southwest Airlines, which introduced new uniforms for its more than 42,000 workers last month.
“For a lot of our garments, we transitioned to a ponte fabric,” said Sonya Lacore, Southwest’s vice president for inflight operations.
Ponte, a heavyweight knit, has a slight stretch to it.
Uniforms also have to reflect the realities of life on the road, with fabric blends that resist stains and wrinkles and can be laundered, if necessary, in a hotel sink. They also need to keep the wearers comfortable, whether their plane touches down in the summer in Maui or in the winter in Minneapolis.
Before giving the new uniforms to employees, the airlines conduct wear tests. The roughly 500 employees in American’s test reported back on details that needed to be changed.
For example, Byrnes said, an initial dress prototype included a back zipper, but flight attendants found it challenging to reach. So the zipper was scuttled in favour of buttons on the front.
For its 1,000-employee wear test, Delta solicited feedback via surveys, focus groups, an internal Facebook page and job shadowing, in which members of the design team traveled with flight crews to get a firsthand view of the demands of the job.
“We had about 160-plus changes to the uniform design as a result of those efforts,’’ Dimbiloglu said.
Pockets — their number, placement and appearance — are a huge issue, airline executives say. Another is shirt length: Inflight crew members need their shirts long enough to stay tucked in when they reach into overhead bins.
Southwest also had to decide whether the new uniforms would keep or eliminate the shorts that were perhaps the most distinguishing feature in the previous uniform design.
“There was quite a bit of debate about it,” Lacore said, since so many of the places where Southwest flies are hot year-round. “We wanted them to be comfortable, and they convinced us shorts are one of the ways they stay cool and comfortable.”
Coming up with styles that will be flattering on a wide variety of body types is another challenge for designers.
“Colour-blocked garments with two or three tones create some interest for the eye and will help lengthen and slim — it can make you look a little more athletic or sport-inspired,” said Caroline Bartek, a fashion designer and creative director at Cintas, which is working with Southwest on its new uniforms.
“I would say another is just having the opportunity to have garments untucked,” she said, adding that more airlines were opting to offer a set of mix-andmatch separates.
“The final design element we’re seeing is that there’s no one prescription.”
Most of the uniform overhauls include clothes not only for flight attendants and gate agents — “above the wing” jobs — but also for the luggage handlers, mechanics and other workers who make up an airline’s “below the wing” workforce.
Below-wing uniforms are more utilitarian, in keeping with the greater physical demands of the job, and incorporate different features.
“We let them bring tools in the room and lay out a design, like, ‘I need this tool in this pocket’,’’ Lacore said.
Even after wear-testing, unexpected issues can crop up. After it rolled out its new uniforms, American faced a number of complaints from workers who reported rashes, respiratory trouble and other health problems after wearing the woolblend suits.
The Association of Professional Flight Attendants said more than 3,500 flight attendants had reported reactions to the new uniforms. It suggested that the reactions could have been set off by chemicals in the fabrics.
Last month, American announced that while its testing “confirms that the current uniforms are safe,” it would not renew its contract with its supplier when it expired in 2020.
“In the meantime,” it said in a letter to workers, “we continue to offer a variety of options, including standard wool, polyester and 100 percent cotton. There is also an off-the-shelf option available by an independent supplier.”
Aside from fit and function, employee uniforms are an important part of an airline’s brand image.
“There’s just been this aura of glamour and interest associated with uniforms,” said Avi Mannis, senior vice president for marketing at Hawaiian Airlines, which is preparing a new uniform for this year.
“Uniforms represent a place and a culture,” he said. “It’s important that we have a uniform that embodies some of those cultural traditions, that had a cultural narrative associated with it.”
To that end, Hawaiian incorporated lehua flowers and traditional patterns in the prints of the fabrics. “Each element on the print is symbolic,” Mannis said.
Shashank Nigam, chief executive of the consulting firm SimpliFlying, said uniforms were a crucial part of an airline’s brand, especially with the decline in the number of in-person encounters a traveler experiences.
“Today more than ever,” he said, “the uniform is the most important symbol of an airline that a passenger interacts with and sees.”