I’ve just returned from a long flight from Frankfurt sitting in what I think is recognised as the worst seat in economy. That’s the aisle seat number 56D where the video reboot box takes up half of one’s ‘leg room’. It’s right next to the preparation area so that every movement of the trolley and every call from demanding passengers involve movement past that seat. And even in the pretend night when the curtains are drawn against the light in the prep area, each movement into the aisle involves a sudden blink of bright light onto that same seat. 

But this is also the seat where one gains a great appreciation for the labour of the flight attendant world. While we ‘sleep’, they sort out problems. A German lady seems to be having strange problems with her video monitor, and although she is four rows behind me, you can feel her becoming calmer the moment the attendants begin to speak her language and make what sound like offers of another hot chocolate. It’s that classic soothing attendant tone which they must teach at flight attendant school: somewhere between matron and mother, with a conviviality that can turn to command. Of all the service professions this is surely the one that embodies the deep complexities of just what service as labour might mean. 

Prudence Black never forgets that the world of airline fashion is animated and articulated through these labouring bodies and she gets us to rethink just how gender, bodies, clothes, service, modernity, post-modernity and technology come to be known to us through what we wear and how wear it. We come to appreciate the cultural work that the hostess uniform does as something that reflects the world around it but also constitutes it. In each turn from navy to orange, from wool to cotton nylon, from maxi to mini, we feel, as well as read, the national and corporate dreams of aviation innovation secured, made safe and sold to passengers via the uniform. It is the uniform that lets science become a service. 

At the same time the flight attendant’s uniform becomes an act of translation. It is the uniform that reassures us that being in the air is not an unnatural act but something safe, domestic, sexy, and even banal. 

This book also gave me an unexpectedly intimate portrait of the national imaginings of Australia from post-war until now. Through the uniform at work in the extreme modernity of the airplane you can see anew the push and pull of Australian culture. The very roots of Qantas being in Queensland and the Northern Territory signals that the deity that arose from our desert was this very modern god, the airplane. But in an environment that demanded that we live with modern technology, the airplane quickly became a very ordinary work-horse. Quite simply the most practical way to cover the natural distances and scale that Australia threw up was to incorporate the airplane into the way we saw ourselves as at home in the Australian environment. 

With that historical imagining you may see why Qantas advertisements work so well upon us still. The spirit of Australia is still invested in moving over rather than through the land. Moving over not seeming to require the thoughtfulness and Indigenous permission that moving through inspires. Therefore the uniforms of those that move within that above-ground space are marked as small, acute performances of ideal nationalism in transit. 

And you can’t help but read the exuberance of the Australian national project off the sheen of these changing uniforms. In each of them – the jet-setting green with Flash Gordon red, the cool Aqua and then the breakout Coral (let’s just call it bright orange) of the post 1968 world – there is some flavour of Australia’s take on the world. Was the sophisticated but practical cosmopolitanism of the Pucci uniform a response to the Whitlam moment, or did people vote for Whitlam because he was the most Pucci-like candidate? And can’t you see Hawke as just the kind of guy who would wear a kangarooed-up Yves St Laurent outfit? And now Morrissey with his thoughtful prints and who knows what next?

The Flight Attendant's Shoe also shows us that the uniform is a wonderful way of seeing gender at work. I loved the constant way in which every uniform was adapted by its wearers to both the conditions of work and the fashions of the time. We learn from this book that female flight attendants in particular had to carry the inequalities of their position represented in the paradox of having a ‘dream job’, while being paid so much less than men doing the same work. And they had to dress in uniforms that stretched between the practical and the chic – all the while managing the double and triple standards of being figures of desire and comfort, modern and maternal and safety-conscious, and consumerist and savvy. Can any uniform have held so many contradictions?

We know it’s quicker to get to London now; it takes 22 hours rather than 226, as it used to. These leaps along the time scale have been accompanied by ideas about how the interior of the plane should be imagined. Was it a select business club that required amenable hostesses and jovial stewards? Was it a frightening technological juggernaut requiring a sense of domestic security and medical back-up? Or is it a bus that needs conductors and facilitators who are terrorist-savvy? In each of these shifts, what was worn in the airspace told its story about who we are, as men and women, as corporate consumers and as national citizens. 

This is an edited version of Katrina Schlunke's launch speech for The Flight Attendant's Shoe published by NewSouth, delivered at the Women's Club Sydney, standing below a lovely portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, to an audience of colleagues, family, friends and many current and former air hostesses, who were the best-groomed people in the room.