Doctor of Philosophy(PhD) / This thesis maps the sixty year history of the Qantas flight attendants’ uniform. It figures the Qantas uniform as a prism through which to explore a history of modern Australian fashion and design, and the social and cultural web that gives life to the image of the Qantas flight attendant, rather than a history of the airline itself. Qantas, with its humble origins in the rural town of Longreach, Queensland, became the national carrier when it combined interests with Britain’s Imperial Airways to form Qantas Empire Airways in 1934. From the time the first female Qantas flight hostess appeared on board in 1948, the aircraft aisle became a 'catwalk for the image-makers'. It is particularly important to the role of the flight hostess, later the flight attendant, that the dress of the cabin crew, although clearly defined as uniforms, also responded to current fashion from the beginning of this history. Although the story of Qantas has been well documented, this thesis will focus on the uncharted area of the evolving design history of flight uniforms from the clinical white dress of the 1940s, through the military designs of the 1950s and the synthetics and stilettos of the 1960s, right through to the corporate designs of the present day. The analysis of such corporate design is a relatively new field. This study uses the flight attendants’ uniform to chart the links between the Australian fashion and textile industry and with militarism, versions of Australian nationalism and cosmopolitanism, the corporate world and the role of international designers in Australian design history. While the method of this thesis is largely archival, meticulously detailing the changing facets of the Qantas uniforms and unfolding those details into an engagement with these historical context, there are other theoretical influences on this study. In particular, it is underpinned by the ‘semiotics of uniformity’ drawn from fashion and design studies and by an equal focus on discourse analysis. The flight hostess’s uniform was always a complex ‘articulation of discourses’ as national image had to be played off against international trends, dominant and emerging gender norms, and the language of professional 'decorum' for people with high levels of responsibility and public exposure. Across each of these registers, the frisson of glamour was also a factor, morphing across this history from images of modernism and internationalism via the quasi-erotics of uniform fetishism into ‘postmodern’ performativity.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/245858 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Black, Prudence |
| Publisher | University of Sydney. |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | The author retains copyright of this thesis., http://www.library.usyd.edu.au/copyright.html |
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