Chapter 8
Love, Fashion, and the Stjuardesa
Yugoslavia’s Jet Age Feminism
A large assembly of officials turned out on April 28, 1962, for one of the most triumphant events in the history of Yugoslav aviation: the ribbon-cutting ceremony for Belgrade’s new international airport. Like a smaller facility that would open just a few months later in the coastal tourist destination of Dubrovnik, the federal capital’s airport was built to the ICAO’s top “A category” specifications, meaning that it was equipped with the highest quality navigation and safety tools and was ready to accommodate frequent landings and takeoffs with heavier payloads, as was needed for the arrival of the Jet Age. The ribbon cutting culminated a planning process dating back to 1947, when Yugoslavia’s Civil Aviation Authority devised plans to overtake Rome and Athens as a gateway for routes between Europe and the Middle East. Belgrade’s new airport was smaller, but in other ways it compared well with Rome’s new airport in the coastal town of Fiumicino that had opened a year earlier, and for several years it outpaced its rival in Athens, where a new and larger Eero Saarinen–designed terminal opened in 1969. Also beyond Belgrade and Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia in 1962 was engaged in a massive airport-building spree, with construction underway on new facilities in Ljubljana, Sarajevo, Split, Mostar, and Rijeka, and major renovations taking place in Zagreb, Skopje, and Titograd (Podgorica) to make them jet-ready.1 The country’s progression in aviation from what an American diplomat called the “stone-age” to the Jet Age was taking place in one socialist-led great leap forward.2
Amid the assembled dignitaries at Belgrade airport, two uniquely dressed individuals stood out in the otherwise monochromatic assembly of men in drab suits. The first was the head of state, Josip Broz Tito, whose camel-colored trench coat and dark sunglasses allowed him to cut a stylish figure, even if the ensemble was more muted than his oft-employed white suits or military uniforms. The second person to steal the show held an admittedly more modest role: a young JAT stewardess accompanied Tito while holding the ceremonial ribbon-cutting scissors on a plush pillow. Yet, her white gloves, smart navy blazer, white blouse, and dainty beret allowed her to stand out as Tito’s visual counterpart. While Tito was the diplomatic mastermind ushering Yugoslavia into the Jet Age, the JAT stewardess embodied a new generation of women equipped with the style, beauty, and independence of the new era—Yugoslavia’s own version of Jet Age feminism.
This event transpired a few years before Mary Wells and Emilio Pucci revolutionized the “plain plane” by injecting a massive dose of color. Instead, what set these new stewardess uniforms apart was just one element of Wells’s and Pucci’s creations: a patina of Western elitism. JAT’s new uniforms were still designed and produced locally and the new iteration had the same drab navy blue skirt and blazer over a white blouse. They were in most ways a continuation of the military-inspired outfits that JAT stewardesses had worn since their first flights. However, there were two new elements that added a distinguished flair to the stewardess alongside Tito. First was her new cap that was flown in from Paris, as the airline had secured the rights from Christian Dior to use the same ones commissioned by Air France.3 They were firm and exclusively decorative, a distinct move away from the partizanka’s foldable cloth caps sported a decade earlier by Dragica Pavlović. There were also newly issued white gloves, which further reinforced the airline’s ties to elite sophistication.
Thus, the JAT stewardess’s look was more fashion-forward than ever, thanks especially to the tie-in with Christian Dior. They were nonetheless still more traditionally elegant and far staider than Pucci’s 1965 Braniff creations. When JAT received its first jets a few months later in January 1963, Yugoslavia’s first Jet Age makeover was complete. JAT could now credibly assure its passengers boarding a jet in Paris, stopping at the ultramodern Belgrade airport, and then progressing across the Mediterranean of equal sophistication to Air France.
Like with the photo above, understanding Yugoslav cosmopolitanism in the Jet Age requires two distinct but interrelated focal points. On the one hand, one must consider the economic and political developments, embodied here by Tito, that allowed the country to move beyond the obscurity imposed on it by the cartography of colonialism. Only part of this transformation involved aviation since the main driver was the country’s increasing economic progress and its corresponding insinuation into the economies of the West and Global South. Most exemplary were the country’s engineering firms, which developed crucial expertise building factories, roads, housing projects, airports, and hydroelectric dams during the country’s rapid postwar industrialization and urbanization. These firms then exported their expertise to similar projects in the Middle East and Africa. By the 1970s, their reputation for quality work at lower costs also opened up footholds in Western Europe. For example, the housing complex for men’s athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics was built by the Belgrade-based firm Energoprojekt.4
JAT followed these engineering firms into new destinations, especially in oil-rich nonaligned countries like Iraq and Libya, where thousands of Yugoslavs were now stationed as architects, engineers, and skilled carpenters. Along with the simultaneous development of the Adriatic coastline for mass tourism, including efforts to attract wealthier Western European visitors, JAT also increased traffic into the new coastal airports of Dubrovnik, Split, and Rijeka. JAT’s route network expanded near and far, while its customer base attracted ever wealthier foreigners and domestic citizens. In these ways, JAT found a market-driven motive for expanding and enhancing its service, which set it apart from its more politically motivated Eastern bloc competitors at Aeroflot, Poland’s LOT, and Czechoslovak Airlines (ČSA), all of which also expanded in the 1960s to the West and Global South.5
In other ways, Yugoslavia’s greater connectedness to the international economy reflected less of a challenge to the cartography of colonialism than the country’s growth as an aviation hub. In fact, there were disturbing signs of continued dependence on the West, akin to the region’s status during the colonial era. In the Cold War years, the out-migration of lesser-skilled citizens to the West remained unabated, continuing a practice from the past century and foreshadowing the current age of neoliberalism. While most of these migrants relocated as Gastarbeiter (guest workers) in the German-speaking lands of West Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and rarely flew with JAT, others migrated further afield—to Canada, Australia, or the United States.6 There was a silver lining in this unfortunate development for JAT: these far-flung diasporic communities offered the airline yet another expansion opportunity. They were a built-in market of people, though mainly of more modest incomes, eager to spend holidays with family back home. They helped fill seats in JAT’s coach class, while the growing number of businesspeople and higher-end foreign tourists settled into JAT’s more exclusive Adriatic class on its first intercontinental flights to Sydney, New York, and Toronto in the 1970s.
This outflow of economic migrants was a warning sign for Yugoslavia’s economy. After all, the need to work abroad reflected a discouraging inability within Yugoslavia to modernize with the speed and commitment to equality that would have allowed its poorer citizens to prosper at home. These economic failures prefigured the even more dire economic upheavals that rocked the country in the 1980s and played an important role in its disintegration into violence by 1991. Indeed, both Yugoslavia and Jamaica share the dubious distinction that by the late 1970s they were both early targets in the International Monetary Fund’s efforts to address runaway debt through often draconian “conditionality agreements.”7
In the 1960s and 1970s, however, before debt became a full-fledged crisis, this sizable out-migration of Yugoslav citizens—more than one million out of a population of roughly twenty million pursued opportunities outside the country—served, somewhat ironically, as a badge of honor in relations with the West. Open emigration policies and open borders aligned Yugoslavia with Clare Boothe Luce’s cherished freedom to fly everywhere, whereas the rigorous emigration and border regimes in Europe’s other socialist regimes exposed them as fearful of granting basic human freedoms. For JAT, this era of almost entirely visa-free travel to and from Yugoslavia was yet another boon, stimulating greater circulation of passengers who filled the new Jet Age terminals across the country.
While these economic and diplomatic developments are vital for understanding the maturation of Yugoslav cosmopolitanism in the Jet Age, this chapter instead concentrates on the photo’s other focal point, the JAT stewardess. She represents how the Jet Age brought about changes tied to women’s roles as the country grew increasingly open to the larger world’s economic and social realities. In particular, a series of social innovations ended up fostering a homegrown version of Jet Age feminism that lacked the overt raunchiness of Braniff Airways’ “Air Strip,” even while objectifying women and fetishizing their increasing sexual availability. All along, JAT stewardesses continued to benefit from the communist-inspired push for women to forge lifelong careers. This mix of work plus objectification plus sexualization led to a convergence of women’s roles in Yugoslavia with those further West in the Jet Age. JAT’s stewardesses worked amid this complicated confluence of regressive sexism and more progressive impulses for greater independence. This chapter details how Yugoslavia’s constituent cultures developed a growing openness toward candid sexual expression starting in the late 1950s and how JAT’s stewardesses became symbols of this change. As such, JAT stewardesses in the Jet Age exhibited certain similarities with Braniff’s stewardesses, even as the Yugoslav iteration of Jet Age feminism remained distinct in important ways.
A Yugoslav Sexual Revolution
Through the mid-1950s, Yugoslavia’s government was conflicted as to how much sexual liberalization to permit. Some changes that increased women’s independence had already occurred in 1946, including amending divorce laws to help women escape from toxic marriages and pushing more women into wage work. Abortion laws also changed between 1952 and 1960 to allow greater reproductive choice, while other contraceptive tools also became available. As an example, Belgrade opened its first contraception clinic in 1955. These developments allowed young people more autonomy, including empowering them to have sex when they desired, even outside of marriage, while deferring pregnancy. Socialist Yugoslavia was therefore building out the legal and healthcare infrastructure necessary for a sexual revolution.8
The country’s popular culture was somewhat slower to embrace such changes. Into the late 1950s, communist authorities strictly prohibited sexual content in films and other media. The historian Predrag Marković notes that change came only in 1957, with the release of the film Saturday Evening (Subotom uveče). Its attack on conservatism began when the film portrayed a common policing practice, with a young Belgrade couple who were kissing arrested for public indecency. However, the film—and the communist authorities who permitted its release—struck a blow against the regime’s puritanism by casting the couple, not the police, as the protagonists. Further liberalization came quickly: “By the mid-1960s everything had changed,” notes Marković, as exemplified by the fact that “after the official program celebrating the Day of Students in 1965 [at the University of Belgrade] a striptease was performed.”9 Despite obvious differences between a one-time event among students and the airing of Braniff’s “Air Strip” commercial on national television, both episodes from 1965 illustrate that sexual expressions like striptease acts were becoming mainstream, in Yugoslavia as well as the United States.
Like their counterparts at Braniff, stewardesses at JAT were public personalities in this sexual revolution, as embodiments of physically attractive working women in the era of Jet Age feminism. Turning JAT stewardesses into sexy exemplars of cosmopolitan womanhood depended first on wider social changes, including the maturation of a consumer economy. In fact, Marković asserts a direct link between the transformation of sexual norms and Yugoslavia’s economic reforms in the late 1950s, which elevated living standards for many people. Just as new women’s magazines like Praktična žena led women to become empowered consumers, a younger Yugoslav generation became more sexually open: “a higher living standard leads to greater independence and, thus, to freer behavior.”10
One of postwar Yugoslav cinema’s first blockbusters illustrates how this spirit of greater sexual openness could be coupled with fetishizing aviation and stewardesses in alluring ways. Entitled Love and Fashion (Ljubav i moda) and released in 1960, the film broke not only from Yugoslav cinema’s heavy dependence on communist-inspired themes, but also from the puritanism critiqued in Saturday Evening.11 As the film critic Dinko Tucaković details, Love and Fashion marked a moment when Yugoslav cinema, which previously was “full of Partisan films,” produced films that “tried to talk about a brighter side of life, which were made in technicolor, which tried to introduce a bit of glamor, and to replace the … heroes from the Partisans or the working class.”12 Love and Fashion mimicked the highly popular Hollywood musical genre that made megastars of actors like Ginger Rogers and Judy Garland. It played a similar role for seventeen-year-old Beba Lončar, the film’s lead actress, who even today remains popular among older generations across ex-Yugoslavia for her numerous films.
Lončar’s character, Sonja, was coded as a modern young woman: she was beautiful in a traditionally feminine way, but she also studied architecture and spent her free time learning to be a glider pilot. Consequently, many of the film’s scenes followed Sonja to Belgrade’s soon-to-be-replaced airport and boasted cameos of JAT’s airplanes and crews. Yet, even before this entwinement of femininity and aviation, the film opens by highlighting various tenets of Helen Gurley Brown’s Jet Age feminist manifesto, Sex and the Single Girl. In the very first scene, Lončar is portrayed as iconically beautiful, impeccably stylish, highly mobile, and focused on finding romance. The film’s first sounds are a catchy, jazzy song, “One Young Woman” (“Jedna mala dama”), whose lyrics yearn for love to overcome loneliness: “A young woman always walks alone. Why is this? Why is this? Why … when she’s a beautiful woman?”
Unlike the song’s fictional persona, Lončar’s character Sonja does not walk, nor is she alone for more than one minute of the film. Instead, with the song playing, Sonja is shown coasting through central Belgrade on a sky-blue Vespa, making her way to the university’s architecture faculty. As conspicuous as Lončar’s flowing blonde hair and her stylish ride is her brilliant sundress, a red-and-white checkered sleeveless design with a deep neckline and a full skirt that flitters in the breeze. It would have been just as trendy on a young collegiate in New York in 1960. Before making it to the university, Sonja first encounters the male lead by nearly running into him as he carelessly crosses the street against a red light. She curses at him, full of indignation, but also confidence. Then, in the following hour-plus of playful adventure, the two progress from initial distaste for each other through various comedic interludes and impromptu moments of breaking into song, to finally end up in a fully sprouted romance.
Love and Fashion boasted Vespas from Italy, dress styles inspired by Paris, upbeat jazz music popularized by Hollywood, and the youthful Yugoslav woman, who was empowered as a fashion connoisseur, a university student, and a glider pilot. However, the fusion was still a bit fantastical as of 1960, even for the children of relative privilege who came of age in urban Yugoslavia. So fashion-forward were Lončar’s dresses that the film’s costume designer had to create them herself. As she recalls: “Nowhere [in the country] could you, say, buy a brightly colored V-necked sweater. My mother stitched together many of the dresses, and a good number of them were done by seamstresses from theaters. Maybe it all looked glamorous and very unique at the end, but back then it was really difficult to make these outfits.”13
The fact that Lončar’s clothing was unattainable for most women made JAT’s Jet Age stewardess, to be clad just two years later in imported Parisian extravagance, even more privileged and desirable. Even in 1960 they spent every working day in stylish uniforms designed by Yugoslavia’s top fashion brands. They also had a salary supplement for cosmetics to allow them to purchase superior imported Western beauty supplies. It is therefore not surprising that JAT and its stewardesses played important cameo roles in Love and Fashion. At various points, JAT’s most modern airplanes fill the film’s backgrounds, with the massive DC-6s that were purchased just before the film’s shooting receiving pride of place. Audiences saw the engines igniting, the planes taking off, and pilots and stewardesses bidding farewell to passengers as they deplaned. The allure of air travel was a key part of the fantastical romance that Yugoslav audiences were having with this cosmopolitan iteration of Yugoslav womanhood. The author and journalist Sonja Ćirić summarized the film’s impact on teenagers in this way:
For just a few months, from Triglav [on the borders with Austria and Italy] to Đevđelija [on the border with Greece], there wasn’t a living thing uninfected by the film: young women thought that if they wore a dress in [the same] design, they would be beautiful like Beba Lončar; young men thought they would meet her if they rode around the city on a Vespa; undiscovered singing talents were convinced they would become famous if they learned the songs from the film … ; and those a bit older of both genders indulged in the sweet images on the screen that they didn’t actually possess in real life.14
Importantly, Love and Fashion also marked the debut of JAT’s stewardesses in film, albeit in a minor role. Unlike with Lončar’s character, the focus was exclusively on beauty, rather than on technological prowess. The scene is set at the airport’s outdoor restaurant, where crew and passengers were assembled awaiting their flights. It opens by following characters already introduced, the all-male managerial team of a Belgrade fashion company called Yugochic (Jugošik), who await their colleague’s arrival from Rome. At another table, an unnamed JAT stewardess and pilot dine together as they await the return flight to Rome.
The scene stresses the glamor of flying. It begins with gratuitous coverage of a JAT DC-6, before cutting to the well-dressed crowd of passengers and JAT employees enjoying meals or drinks on the sun-soaked terrace. As though coincidentally, Yugoslavia’s most famous singer and actress, Gabi Novak, joins the crowd, playing herself in the film. Everyone turns to catch a glimpse of the star. As appropriate for a member of Yugoslavia’s small but growing jet set, Novak announces that she is on JAT’s flight to Rome.
In the meantime, the Yugochic team has noticed that the JAT stewardess is now sitting alone. The commercial director, played by the comedian Miodrag Petrović, decides to go over and court the woman. Typical of slapstick comedians, he does so in a way that is overdone, such that his performance would likely elicit both awkward unease and, potentially, laughter from the film’s viewers. The basis for such immature behavior is the irresistible beauty of the stewardess, which turns him into a bundle of nerves. Ultimately, the courteous smile wears off the stewardess’s face so that she can put an end to the uncomfortable encounter: “Oh! You’re so aggressive! I wouldn’t allow myself to go on the plane with you.” To defuse the tense situation, Petrović’s character apologizes and admits defeat in his courtship efforts, just as an announcement comes that the flight to Rome is boarding. The stewardess rises to join the flight crew, but before leaving, both characters grab their glasses of šljivovica (plum brandy) and toast each other. While not the sober comportment required of flight attendants, the concluding toast fit with Petrović’s comedic role: it signaled to viewers that his awkward advances, which bordered on harassment, were written off and forgiven.
Despite the brevity of JAT stewardesses’ film debut, it nonetheless crystallized for audiences the notion that stewardesses were young, beautiful, and sexually available. The only items missing from Mary Wells’s Jet Age redesign of Braniff stewardesses were a colorful and high-style uniform and the raunchiness of the “Air Strip.” To further accentuate the stewardess’s beauty, the filmmakers cast a well-known local heartthrob who returned from Hollywood to play the role. Model and actress Ljubica Otašević came of age playing basketball for the sports club Red Star Belgrade, where she befriended several prominent men, including Yugoslavia’s Nobel Prize–winning author Ivo Andrić. In her mid-twenties she was discovered by a Hollywood talent agent and in 1958 she served as the double for Sophia Loren in the romance The Key. Casting Otašević further elevated JAT stewardesses as objects of desire for straight men and objects of envy for many women, who yearned to be like either the skilled glider pilot Sonja or the stewardess who enjoyed access to Yugoslavia’s jet set via her work and beauty.15
A similar pop culture rendering of JAT stewardesses came two years later, in 1962, when singer Đorđe Marjanović released a popular song in the Schlager style of Frank Sinatra. Titled “Stjuardesa” (the stewardess), the song recounts a man’s infatuation with a stewardess. It is sung from the viewpoint of a passenger who has not flown before. He approaches a stewardess in the terminal to ask which plane is his; however, before he addresses her, he falls for her: “These eyes more blue than the sky we sail, more brilliant than the sun, eyes full of dreams.”16 Unlike the stewardess portrayal in Love and Fashion, Marjanović’s song describes an infatuation based on more than looks. This was a woman who, due to her vast experience with flying, was more self-assured than the man. The lyrics continue with the man, now sitting on the plane, worried for his safety and needing the stewardess to calm him: “With her I would never be afraid of anything. All the way I would look into her eyes.” The woman’s strength sparks this man’s desires, which catch fire even though he forgot to ask the stewardess’s name. Thereafter he is haunted by her memory: “Everywhere I seek your eyes, every airplane I await.”17
In the five years between the 1957 film Saturday Evening and the 1962 song “Stjuardesa,” socialist-era Yugoslavia’s popular culture had jettisoned much of its sexual puritanism. While overt sexual scenes or references to them were still absent from both Love and Fashion and “Stjuardesa,” sexual attraction was now an accepted leitmotif. There may have been a socialist inspiration to this development, at least in this sense: these works portrayed fashionable and infatuation-ripe women as engaged in modern careers like stewardessing or as architects in training. Yet, as more women in North America and Western Europe also entered lifelong careers, the differences between women in socialist and capitalist societies were blurring. Whether in the United States or Yugoslavia, role models like Helen Gurley Brown, Mary Wells, Beba Lončar’s Sonja, and Ljubica Otašević’s stewardess were promoting a Jet Age feminist vision that coupled style and sexual availability with a commitment to serious work outside the home.
Sexual Infatuations Enfleshed
A JAT stewardess who flew both before and after the release of the song “Stjuardesa” in 1962 found these to be thrilling years. She also believes that this excitement derived from the sources that the song covers: men fell for her not only because of her beauty, but also due to her feminine strength. First and foremost, she claims, many men fell for her attractiveness. As she divulged, “Well, among men we were more popular than even some actresses,” before continuing, “To get to the old … airport in the morning I had to walk a fair way from the bus stop to the terminal. There was a student who met me there every morning, who would politely ask, ‘May I accompany you to the airport?’ It was a total crush!”
In the next breath, she added a second compelling trait that also attracted men: “Well, also bravery. Of course, I was very brave for the time.” In her case, this bravery had two aspects, including how she endured the risks of air travel and exuded confidence to less seasoned passengers. However, she also saw herself as brave because she defied her parents’ will by entering this career. Knowing her mother’s fears of air travel, she kept her work secret for an entire year. “I just told [my parents] that I work at the airport and that this work requires me to be there day and night.” This lie accounted for her frequent overnight absences without revealing that she was sometimes staying in cities hundreds of kilometers away. For her, gaining more freedom from familial restraints was one of the main appeals of stewardess work.18
This balance of expressing both physical beauty and independence is also found in the memoirs of another JAT stewardess hired at the time, Milica Lukić. According to her book Recollections of a Stewardess (Zapisi stjuardese), Lukić was already working an office job for an import-export company when she applied at JAT in 1962.19 While she was confident in professional settings and financially secure, she found that applying for the flight attendant job was unsettling due to JAT’s rigorous beauty standards: “I know I tried in those days to look beautiful. Simple, but beautiful,” but she was not sure that would suffice. Yet, as she entered JAT’s headquarters for her interview, she had a bit of good luck, “As I waited for the elevator, in the lobby I heard a few people saying: ‘She’s surely a stewardess!’” Overhearing these compliments “emboldened me,” Lukić added, “and I think because of this I was able to present myself a bit more confidently before the [hiring] commission.”20 The fact that this young career woman was anxious about her appearance demonstrates how JAT’s focus on beauty grew more intense as Love and Fashion tied stewardesses to Hollywood-caliber beauty and songs like “Stjuardesa” made them objects of infatuation.
JAT’s marketing initiatives starting with the dawn of the Jet Age in 1963 also cast stewardesses in more sexually alluring ways, though in ways that again fell short of Mary Wells’s “Air Strip.” Figures 8.3. 8.4, and 8.5 illustrate different renditions from the mid-1960s and early 1970s in which women were centered. Even while employing a tamer strategy, they still establish a feminine mystique, if you will, tied to jet travel. The first two images employ a sort of victimless objectification: they use animation rather than photography to elicit desire for stewardesses. The first image from 1963 shows a woman animated from the neck up, while nonetheless highlighting her perfect hair, eyes, and lips.
The woman’s face on a poster that otherwise brags of JAT’s first jets is still jarring: why promote the airline’s technological advancement via stewardesses? A closer look reveals that there are actually two competing circular orbits that vie for the viewer’s attention. The less prominent of these is a perfect circle, colored in red, that the airline’s new Caravelle jet is intersecting—perhaps an homage to jet technology’s ties to space exploration. Yet, a competing orbit, oblong and perpendicular to the red circle and traced in black ink, frames the stewardess’s face. This second orbit is also part of Yugoslavia’s ascent into the Jet Age; in fact, the pull of this feminine orbit is just as intense as the jet plane’s—maybe more so, given that the woman’s face and her oblong orbit is more prominent. That these two orbits commingle suggests that two tracks of male desire converged with JAT’s ascent into the Jet Age. The moment marked the fruition of technological mastery (the success of man’s exploratory drive) and of sexual desire (with its link to man’s drive for sex).
The next two images date from the years 1968 to 1973, at least a half-decade later than the first. The focus here is on JAT’s above-the-knee uniforms, which debuted in the latter part of the 1960s, after Emilio Pucci’s Braniff designs had been introduced. One image retains certain elements of the first: the use of animation, the same depiction of the Caravelle jet, the same fonts. But here, the notion of “cosmic” is attained not by orbital lines, but rather by a depiction of a globe, drawn from the perspective of space. The woman, seated upon it, is now a full-bodied temptress, akin to Marguerite LeWars Kirkpatrick’s role in Dr. No: her hand accentuates her exposed knee, and her straight hair is complemented by a straight face (no smile) and a direct stare. The result is a seductive invitation from the stewardess to explore her, in the spirit of jet pilots or astronauts. At the same time, the warm colors most prominent in the image emanate from her skin, especially from her legs, which are now exposed above the knee for the first time in the airline’s history. For all the movement and progress of the Jet Age, this image suggests that the movement of stewardesses’ hemlines, ever upward, is a parallel achievement.
The third image fleshes out a similar narrative, though this time using an actual photo. This poster from the early 1970s emphasizes the exposed legs of stewardess Ksenija Pavlović, which blend visually into the column supporting the city of Belgrade’s most famous monument: the Victor (Pobednik), forged by the modernist Croatian sculptor Ivan Mestrović after World War I.21 Audiences in Yugoslavia would have immediately recognized this streamlined statue, which soars over the city, arising out of the ancient foundations of the city’s fortress and projecting itself far above the streets of Tito’s modernist New Belgrade (Novi Beograd), which lay across the Sava River. Images of jets are absent in this photo—what remains is a focus on the beautiful stewardess, especially her legs, which are craftily synced with the iconic Victor.
In the early 1970s JAT was engaged in yet another expansion that marked the next phase of its immersion into the Jet Age. Since 1963, the company had operated Caravelle jets, whose range maxed out with the distances between Belgrade and London in the West and with its trans-Mediterranean destinations of Cairo and Beirut. By the 1970s, however, the airline was eager to follow the country’s growing economic ties and its sizable emigration flows even further afield, to New York, the airline’s first destination in North America, and via a variety of Middle Eastern and Asian stopovers all the way to Sydney. It would not be until 1975 that the airline found enough demand on these transoceanic routes for scheduled service. However, as early as 1970, thanks to the purchase of used Boeing 707 jetliners, JAT was able to begin charter service to the United States and Australia. By 1975, JAT also had added a fleet of three new Boeing 727s, which were equally capable of traversing the Atlantic and the Pacific.
In 1973 the Belgrade-based illustrated news magazine Ilustrovana politika, with one of the country’s largest readerships, profiled a pleasant side effect of this expansion: JAT’s largest class of flight attendants to date—sixty women and men, though heavily dominated by women—reported to JAT’s pilot training facility. The article opened by remarking on a profound change when this group arrived: “Instead of handsome, brave young men impatiently awaiting to twist up into the sky by airplane … we met a bouquet of young women. One was more beautiful than the other, and all of them were gorgeous, as though a selection show for Miss World was soon to take place here.” Reinforcing this emphasis on physical beauty, the article and its accompanying photos ran under the headline, “The Sky’s Most Beautiful Crew.”22 In imitation of a haute couture fashion shoot, the magazine’s photographer set the recruits in a misty forest among the leafless trees of winter, creating an edgy effect accentuating their physical forms.
As the reference to the Miss World pageant indicates, the association of stewardesses with beauty reflected more than just Yugoslav norms. After all, Jamaica too, through the likes of Carol Joan Crawford and Marguerite LeWars Kirkpatrick, aspired to the Western-dominated ranks of feminine beauty through such pageants. While the nationwide Miss Yugoslavia beauty contest dated back to 1927, the communists disallowed its return for two decades after World War II. Only in 1966, in the years of sexual liberalization, did the pageant return, with the winner joining the Miss World competition. This return marked a key moment when the Western-influenced objectification of women entrenched itself more deeply in the socialist state, especially when the first postwar Miss Yugoslavia, Dubrovnik’s Nikica Marinović, became not only the first candidate from a communist country to compete in Miss World, but was also crowned runner-up. Marinović immediately became a celebrity in Yugoslavia. Though she turned down movie roles, she married the well-known Belgrade film director Vuk Vučo and remained a prominent fixture of Belgrade’s jet set for the next decade.23
Readers of Yugoslav fashion magazines also knew that Western stewardesses were increasingly engaged with pageant-style beauty norms and the free-wheeling sexual libertinism glamorized in Hollywood in the 1960s. While the 1967 best-selling book Coffee, Tea or Me? was not translated into Serbian or other Yugoslav languages, readers of the Belgrade fashion magazine Bazar—the same publication that managed the Miss Yugoslavia contest every year—were introduced to its contents.24 The American book offered a mildly salacious account of stewardesses’ carefree sex lives, as embellished by flight attendants Trudy Baker and Rachel Jones, the alleged authors who, it later was revealed, covered for the male public relations specialist who actually wrote the book. In August 1969, Bazar ran an extensive interview with Baker under the provocative headline: “Stewardesses on Passengers: Italian Men Undress You with Their Eyes,” detailing the book’s premise and some of the stewardesses’ exploits.25
All the same, the Ilustrovana politika profile of JAT stewardesses still took pains to distance Yugoslavia’s stewardesses from the worst sexist excesses faced by their Western peers. While the article did proudly point out that part of their training involved lessons on “aesthetics and cosmetics, which are taught by experts from Dior who arrive directly from Paris,” it also complicated this focus on beauty with a quote from stewardess candidate Slavica Radulović, who asserted, “We’re not all failed film divas, like many think of us.” The journalist proceeded to note that Radulović, like many of her fellow trainees, was a university student. In her case, it was her love of world literature that led her to apply for the job: “I love reading most of all, so I want to head to Paris, London, and Moscow to find books that interest me … I’ll be registered at all the world’s libraries, and who can do that any better than a stewardess,” she added.
Another trainee, Ružica Milosavljević, followed the examples of her uncle, a JAT pilot, and her aunt, who flew agricultural planes, by receiving a sporting pilot’s license before starting her stewardess training. She even confessed to being unsure whether she preferred piloting over stewardessing. The uncertainty was something she felt deeply: “I’m not even sure myself if I’d like to become the first female pilot for our passenger aviation, [as] there’s also something holding me back.” When elaborating on this uncertainty, she added, “I’m so calm when I’m piloting, I’m collected and happy as if I were reading a beautiful book at home. But is this really something for a woman or not?”26
Note that the article’s author artfully placed this uncertainty in the thoughts of the woman herself, as though it was a strictly personal decision to exclude herself from the pilot corps. In reality, of course, there was an interwoven set of factors in Yugoslavia that prevented women from becoming pilots—a web so strong that no woman was ever hired in JAT’s entire history. Of course this exclusion violated the article from the 1946 constitution that legislated women’s full equality in workplaces. Thus, crediting the woman’s choice of stewardessing over piloting as her own personal decision was the only way to hold the socialist state blameless for this failure.
Instead of critiquing the state, the article instead differentiated JAT’s stewardesses from their Western peers in a way that suggested important benefits for women under socialism. Thus, on the one hand, the journalist objectified these women as the “most beautiful crew in the sky”—supposedly outdueling the West’s women on this metric. Yet, on the other hand, he also emphasized JAT applicants’ backgrounds as university students, certified pilots, or already successful career women. He also stressed their better treatment at JAT: “In our society, there is no set maximum working age for stewardesses. Additionally [the veteran stewardesses who were training the newcomers] are both married and they have children. Neither of these things in our society is considered a hindrance to being a good stewardess.”27
If the author had opted to, he could have also mentioned that these restrictions on Western women were now more contested than ever. At the time he was writing, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) was hearing a case from Belgian stewardess Gabrielle Defrenne, who sued her employer, Sabena, when they fired her for turning forty.28 It would take the ECJ another few years, until 1976, to finally side with Defrenne and eliminate forms of “indirect discrimination” like marriage and pregnancy bans as well as early retirement rules that were policies “hiding the danger that primarily members of only one gender were disadvantaged.”29 Only after this were airlines in Western Europe’s European Economic Community (the future European Union) required to match Yugoslavia’s workplace policies for flight attendants on age, marriage, and pregnancy.
Even in other areas pertaining to a stewardess’s physical appearance beyond the scope of the Ilustrovana politika article, JAT’s treatment was indeed less draconian in 1973 than in Western Europe and North America. Interviews with JAT stewardesses who flew at the time added details on JAT’s weight policy, which was a panic-inducing reality further west. Whereas supervisors at airlines like Braniff, Pan Am, BOAC, and Air France had the right to weigh stewardesses at will and frequently did so, JAT’s stewardesses were weighed once per year in their annual medical exam. New applicants who were over the airline’s rigorous weight targets were screened out during the interview process, but active stewardesses risked only probation, most often with the right to continue working, if they failed their annual check. Thus, whereas weight violations were common grounds for dismissal at North Atlantic carriers, interviewees recalled no one at JAT losing their job for such transgressions. They were even unsure if termination had been an option for the airline.
Overall, then, like the somewhat clumsy and contradictory Ilustrovana politika article, JAT adhered to an inherently awkward formula when overseeing its stewardesses in the era of Jet Age feminism. It imposed demeaning and objectifying standards on these women, while nonetheless falling short of Western airlines’ rigorous enforcement of them. Thus, even as the article’s author boasted of JAT’s more enlightened legal policies on marriage and age, he still expected stewardesses to make the more enlightened choice to quit on their own: “These young women know that the job of a stewardess, like that of a ballerina, can’t be done for the entirety of one’s working years.” He simultaneously praised and devalued one of the most progressive features of JAT’s stewardess corps: like the first JAT stewardess, Dragica Pavlović, stewardesses in the 1970s could still potentially work a full-length career.30 Yet, in this era of Jet Age feminism, the greater priority seemed to be for women to represent Yugoslavia well at pageants like Miss World and for JAT stewardesses to be “the sky’s most beautiful crew.”
Yugoslavia’s Pucci
Fashion is one area in which this chapter’s original dual foci—politics and economics, plus gender—reconverge. After all, fashion was, first and foremost, an economic enterprise targeted by Yugoslavia’s central planners as a major focus of industrialization and, in time, a designated export field. At the same time, fashion’s role as a consumer product and a locus of aesthetic choices allows an examination of how Yugoslav women meshed with cosmopolitan trends during the Jet Age. Thus, when JAT seized on its 1975 launch of scheduled routes to Australia and the United States to overhaul its stewardess uniforms, the moment underscored the gender-based consequences of Yugoslavia’s rise as a small, but disproportionately influential global power. The resulting uniforms resisted simple conformity to the West, including Pucci’s work for Braniff. Instead, JAT’s uniforms strove for what we might consider a nonaligned iteration of fashion, with inspiration from each node of the Cold War cosmos: East, West, and Global South.
The key actor in the 1975 redesign was one of the country’s major fashion designers, Aleksandar Joksimović. His career began in the 1950s and tracked the maturation of Yugoslavia’s fashion industry from its original focus on low- to medium-quality everyday workwear to higher-end, export-oriented ensembles. Joksimović’s first work was to design simple patterns for ready-to-wear women’s professional dresses and suits. At the time Yugoslavia utilized its access to Egyptian cotton to open textile mills focused on staple fashions for the domestic market. These mills served not only to clothe its urbanizing citizenry but also to open more factory jobs for lower-skilled women workers.31
By the mid-1960s, Joksimović’s work had matured alongside the country’s textile companies, which were now aspiring to capitalize on the country’s low-wage structure to export higher-end products to the West and Global South. Joksimović, who apprenticed under Christian Dior in Paris, was now creating clothing for women’s professional and leisure needs, and he eventually headed the design team at one of Yugoslavia’s major export-based fashion houses, Centrotekstil. His employer in turn sent his designs to target markets like Paris, where, in the words of the magazine Praktična žena in 1965, “Paris-Jour and Elle are rushing to ensure that their pages are devoted to the models of Aleksandar Joksimović,” since his designs have “quickly … conquered the world metropole.”32
Undoubtedly, part of Joksimović’s appeal both to consumers in Yugoslavia and abroad was his loyalty to trends that designers like Emilio Pucci and Christian Dior had already been offering women in the West. As though echoing their work, Joksimović affirmed in a 1965 interview that “the fundamental mistake of our women is that they think that quantity [of fabric in an outfit] renders elegance. This leads to imbalance and tackiness in clothing.” Joksimović pressed Yugoslav women to embrace a greater simplicity in cut: “I personally … love a simple uncut dress, as it alone enables clean lines to stand out. And when clean lines are revealed, you have an elegant style even without any sort of jewelry.”33 The sketches Joksimović included in Praktična žena with his comments portrayed the sort of formfitting, streamlined look best suited for the “women in motion” that Pucci designed for.
The key difference between Joksimović and Pucci involved color. Whereas Pucci’s jet-set creations employed color for its boldness and exoticism, Joksimović instead cautioned that “the question of color is a very delicate one” and that “an affinity for playing with color requires a truly refined taste.” If she lacked this sort of mastery, then “a woman needs to favor classic and dark tones. These assure simplicity.” After all, concludes Joksimović, returning to echo Pucci after defying him on color, “it is simple lines and details that are magically transformative—this is the truth that every woman needs to acknowledge.”34
Joksimović spoke of fashion in a distinctly Western, capitalist way, stressing a woman’s transformation and emancipation through clothing and even naming dressing up as a process that is “magically transformative.” This sort of vocabulary mimicked—though with the opposite intent—the way Karl Marx had critiqued the industrialized world’s “commodity fetishism” a century earlier.35 At the same time, however, Joksimović was aware that Yugoslav women, as well as their middle-class and working-class counterparts in the West, were different consumers than the jet-set elites who bought Pucci dresses in high-end boutiques. His emphasis on simplicity was based on the reality that one dress needed to satisfy multiple needs for his customers. He knew that “every woman has to have one dress that can be worn in any situation. This has to be a simple dress of good material … which will stay in style through the whole year and for any celebratory occasion: for a concert, for a visit to the theater, and for any sort of evening party.”36 This imperative to design such “magical” clothing for women living in relative austerity was a skill that Joksimović learned not in Dior’s Paris workshop, but rather in the design studio of a socialist, state-owned enterprise in Europe’s East.
By the time the Jet Age had taken hold in Yugoslavia, the country’s textile industry had matured even further, to the point that state planners saw opportunities to enter Western markets with haute couture ensembles. In the late 1960s youth-inspired fashion movements were taking over traditional centers like London’s Carnaby Street with not only bolder colors, but also bolder fabric choices.37 Yugoslavia’s well-developed fur and leather fashion sectors saw a boom in these years and began attracting high prices in the West for more eccentric, well-designed, and expertly manufactured goods. Thus, Joksimović again joined a cadre of fashion pioneers in Yugoslavia, as he was commissioned by Centrotekstil to design one of the country’s first high-end collections for the export market.
It was in these projects starting in 1967 that Joksimović, while now designing for a similar clientele as Pucci, looked beyond both capitalism and state socialism for inspiration. Analogous to Pucci’s borrowings from the color patterns of Latin America and Southeast Asia in his high-end designs, Joksimović also developed a style that the fashion historian Danijela Velimirović aptly calls “grandiose exoticism.” As she notes, this choice was more typical of fashion arising from the Global South, where designers resurrected pre-European motifs (saris, kente cloth) and infused into their designs a mix of the archaic and modern.38
Unlike Pucci’s appropriation of aesthetics that he collected as a tourist in the Global South, Joksimović sought “grandiose exotic” roots within the Western Balkans’ own folk legacies. His debut haute couture line “Simonida” was a modern rendition of the monastic-like costumes worn by Serbian medieval royalty, while one of his 1968 collections, “Vitraž,” derived inspiration from the stained-glass windows of the region’s Catholic and Orthodox churches. In all these works, Joksimović fused medieval inspirations with modern fashion elements that meshed well with the innovations arising in the West’s trendiest fashion centers. His works from the late 1960s and early 1970s were disorienting in their combination of retro and hip, but there was also something primordially local and pre-bourgeois in their folkloric inspirations. As Velimirović points out, this style was well-suited for Tito’s engagement with the Global South: “Given that this international movement [nonalignment] was composed primarily of postcolonial nations whose politics of fashion included forms of exoticism, including wearing traditional dress or an adaptation of it combined with elements adopted from Western fashion systems, fashion in the ‘national style’ was the perfect equivalent to the clothing of the nonaligned countries.”39 The otherwise white, European Yugoslavia could thereby express its own form of “grandiose exoticism” alongside its allies in the Global South.
When Joksimović agreed in 1974 to produce new uniforms for JAT, the airline was hoping for a similar balance between retro and hip, but it also desired a homegrown way of matching Pucci’s appeal at Braniff. By that time accustomed to working almost exclusively on haute couture fashion, Joksimović found the task of designing stewardess uniforms a challenging return to his past pursuits of eveningwear outfits and workers’ clothing. As he admitted, “Work uniforms, which stewardess outfits truly are, are not an unfamiliar theme, since I started my career creating work clothes. However, this task was more delicate than I imagined.”40 Stewardesses used their uniforms more frequently and in far more trying settings than the wealthy clients who purchased his typical runway items. “The fabrics have to be durable,” Joksimović asserted, “they can’t ball up, they can’t be too hot for the temperature on the plane or for the differences in climate. The uniforms have to be both beautiful and comfortable.” He then added a comment that strongly differentiated his work from Braniff’s, noting that the uniforms “also can’t be too flirtatious because they’re actually uniforms.”41
As his last line suggests, JAT’s socialist work norms made Joksimović’s task more challenging than what Pucci had faced at Braniff a decade earlier. Pucci was not required to respond to stewardesses’ input, and the company’s marketing team actually reveled in having a flirtatious quality to their outfits. At JAT, however, the stewardesses themselves—working through the auspices of the company’s Workers’ Council—would have the final say on which uniforms to adopt. As one journalist noted, these stewardesses would “understandably also have the desire that their appearance be beautiful and elegant—like a model.” At the same time, though, the practical concerns Joksimović cited would be equally compelling: “They themselves would know best which uniforms are most suitable for their work.”42 Thus, Joksimović had to respect these socialist exigencies, even as he developed an aesthetic for JAT’s new flights to New York and Sydney that reflected the high-style glamor of the Jet Age West and also embodied the “grandiose exoticism” that bespoke the country’s alignment with the Global South.
Ultimately concluding that such a balance was unattainable, Joksimović and his promotions team at Centrotekstil opted instead to craft what were in effect two collections of JAT uniforms. The first such collection, which included the samples shown above, were boldly colorful and ornate. Joksimović anchored each of these uniforms in JAT’s traditional navy blue, but he also added striking accents of red and white, the other colors of the Yugoslav flag. In some mockups, the fabrics also flowed generously, mimicking (with flowing capes and coats) styles typical of medieval Serbian royalty, or (in terms of headscarves) peasant women across Yugoslavia.
Yet, any touch that was too “grandiose” (bold colors, flowing coats) made these designs too impractical for stewardesses. Upon seeing these images, no stewardess I interviewed who worked in 1975 recognized them, but they also had immediate thoughts on why: uniforms with too much white or red fabric would be impossible to keep clean, while flowing fabrics would catch in the aisleways and be too difficult to store in cramped storage bins. Any element that was too “exotic” also detracted from these stewardesses’ need to have uniforms that were easily washable and wearable. That said, Joksimović and Centrotekstil still employed these impractical, but stunning uniforms for public relations purposes. During Belgrade’s Fashion Fair in 1975, the designs attracted significant attention, allowing Joksimović to employ them to elicit both media attention and plentiful feedback from audiences comprised of the general public, fashion wholesalers, journalists, and specially invited JAT stewardesses and officials.43
Within a few weeks, however, Joksimović had readied a final version of uniforms that were much simpler than those from the Belgrade Fair. Responsive to stewardesses’ needs for a color scheme easier to keep clean, Joksimović jettisoned the ample use of white and red, instead coupling an almost black navy-blue skirt with a stewardess’s choice of blouses: one in the same dark navy color and another composed of a slightly lighter shade of blue that also boasted a white collar with red and navy touches. A red, white, and blue scarf was available for those wishing to complement the monochrome skirt-blouse combination. In the end, Joksimović professed himself satisfied with the color palette: “The color of the outfit is of foremost importance … I embedded a discreet Yugoslav tricolor, while the dark blue agrees with any color of skin and hair.”44 Of course, his use of the term “discreet”—a significant contrast from the “grandiose” nature of so many of his creations—marked for Joksimović a significant concession to stewardesses’ demands for practicality.
Also jettisoned in the final JAT uniforms were the “exotic” elements that predominated elsewhere in Joksimović’s work. In particular, scarves were now worn around the neck, not atop the head, while blouses were quite modern in that they were tapered to fit tightly. A slight move away from Pucci’s embrace of formfitting, mobility-enhancing styles was found in Joksimović’s choice of skirts, as he jettisoned Pucci’s preferred above-the-knee versions in favor of a longer and more freely flowing design that was at least reminiscent of traditional peasant styles. This cautious retro-extravagance then returned at the neck, either with the oversized blue, white, and red collar or the similarly colored scarf.
Thus, even as the uniform’s overall effect was more modest than “grandiose” and more contemporary than “exotic,” there was still a subtle contrast between elements of the traditional and the modern that attested to JAT’s and Yugoslavia’s unique efforts to forge a Jet Age fashion ensemble that was at once born in the East, appropriately glamorous for the West, and tradition-inspired and exotic enough to be allied with the Global South. Joksimović’s own analysis of the uniform stresses these contrasts, suggesting that Yugoslavia’s national ethos (to the extent such a thing existed) resided therein: “The uniform of a stewardess symbolizes in a way the country, the climate of the company, the nation, the race. It must attain a synchronicity of aesthetics and the demands of work. The uniform is both practical and elegant.”45
The stewardesses interviewed for this chapter were unanimous in praising Joksimović’s 1975 creations. Many cited their practicality. Like with Pucci’s creations for Braniff, they could be washed easily in a hotel sink on an overnight layover, while the separate skirt and blouse made them easy to pack in a carry-on. There was even room to pack extras of both for longer journeys. The mix-and-match components were also quite popular, as stewardesses had a degree of autonomy to compose a wardrobe slightly different from their peers or from what they had worn the day before. In addition, many of the women appreciated the unique style that the uniforms gave them in contrast to other airlines: they were one of a kind, designed and produced in the home country, and they embodied both simplicity and elegance. One stewardess stressed that she had enjoyed almost all her JAT uniforms through the years, as they always made her feel “feminine and distinguished … [and very] stylish.” But Joksimović’s creation was her favorite, as it was all these things plus “comfortable and modern” and, quite practically, “it was easier to clean” than the uniforms both before and after.46
More than one stewardess confessed pride in their work and in the way that JAT competed with other world airlines, even as they knew their work lives were both “different and similar” to stewardesses at the West’s more storied airlines. While the work itself was “very very similar” around the world and the women in these positions “shared the same problems,” according to one stewardess, it was Yugoslavia’s socialism that was so different. At one stewardess conference she attended in London, “there were two of us [from JAT], and we were the only participants from a socialist country.” When recognizing this fact, she noted, “In a way, I was proud, very proud. Because many things were ok in this socialist system,” and she was therefore pleased to be part of a socialist enterprise that allowed her to stand as an equal on the global stage. She proceeded to acknowledge plenty of problems in this system, but added a benefit that, in her view, outweighed these negatives: the “absence of nationalism” was, for her, “one of the great things about socialism, real socialism.”47 Thus, being at the conference as a product of both socialism and the multinational Yugoslav experiment was an honor for her, at least in these peak years at JAT.
Yugoslavia’s Jet Age officially commenced in 1962 with the opening of the new jet-ready Belgrade Airport. Within days, the first foreign-operated jets landed in Belgrade, while just a few months later, JAT put its own jets into service. At the ribbon-cutting ceremony, the JAT stewardess accompanying Premier Tito modeled a new uniform, one mimicking Christian Dior’s designs for Air France stewardesses. She thereby exuded a cosmopolitan, Parisian sophistication that reinforced the country’s ascent into the world’s elite echelon of Jet Age states. Just a few years later, however, both the airline based in the West’s fashion capital of Paris and its smaller Eastern nearby neighbor based in Belgrade—indeed, all airlines in the world—struggled to catch up stylistically to Emilio Pucci’s creations for Braniff. By the late 1960s, nobody wanted to be flying on a “plain plane” and served by a stewardess that, in Pucci’s words, looked like they were “traveling by bus in the year 1925.”48
Airlines with primarily domestic routes in the United States or leisure-based international routes—think carriers like American Airlines or Southwest Airlines or, indeed, the heavily leisure-focused Air Jamaica—followed a fairly consistent strategy in the resulting fashion competition: they kept Pucci’s emphasis on color, while raising stewardesses’ hemlines further up and lowering the necklines further down. Thus, by 1970, leisure travelers found an orgiastic explosion of female allure on display while on their vacation getaways. This was all much to the delight of certain straight businessmen, the world’s most frequent fliers and most lucrative customers, who now had intimate access to skimpily clad stewardesses.
However, international flag carriers that were not heavily leisure-oriented had a more sophisticated and cosmopolitan reputation to uphold. The Pan Ams, BOACs, and Air Frances of the world had no desire to mimic Mary Wells’s “Air Strip” raunchiness, as it was deemed to be too pedestrian for their more culturally conservative clientele. The fact that some of the world’s great national flag carriers were state-owned (Pan Am was an exception here) mattered as well, since state institutions generally had less latitude to engage in marketing that so overtly exploited women. Instead, these more elite international airlines strove to embrace aspects of the Braniff revolution without the same crassness as domestic competitors or international leisure carriers. For the world’s leading non-Western carriers, one option was to adopt the “grandiose exoticism” of national dress: Japan Air Lines adorned stewardesses in kimonos for part of their flights, while Air India dressed their stewardesses in saris—and, in a nod to “Air Strip”–style playfulness, even briefly clad them in paper saris, which passengers could also buy and take home.49
Legacy carriers in the West, however, more typically adhered to aspects of the Braniff formula that did not include overt sexualization. These airlines in the late 1960s or early 1970s hired top-name fashion designers to rival Pucci (Evan-Picone for Pan Am, Clive Evans for BOAC, and Carlos Balenciaga for Air France) and then encouraged them to creatively play with color and cut. The results fell short of Pucci’s work in terms of palette—most kept to shades of blue or tan—but none of them crafted outfits that would be confused with 1925 bus attendants. Instead, the designers combined chicness, a tighter fit, and a fresher color palette while remaining within the cosmopolitan confines of traditional sophistication.
Not surprisingly, just as JAT imitated Air France at the dawn of the Jet Age, so too did it at the peak of its Jet Age in 1975, when it initiated flights to North America and Australia. Like Balenciaga at Air France, JAT’s chosen designer Aleksandar Joksimović never aspired to the same color explosion and suggestive layering (and disrobing) that Pucci and Mary Wells created for Braniff. Instead, he went a different direction. While still embracing the Pucci model of styling outfits for a “woman in motion,” the final product for JAT—revised with input from stewardesses on the company’s Workers’ Council—aspired to a very different cosmopolitanism, one not so captive to the oversexualized male gaze of the 1960s. Indeed, and here his work contrasted even with Balenciaga’s at Air France, Joksimović worked at the intersection of Yugoslavia’s commitments to West, East, and South. He thereby expressed a cosmopolitanism that was more universal in inspiration than Pucci’s and Braniff’s, or even Air France’s.
JAT’s stewardesses ended up clad in outfits that were well-suited for the hyper-mobile lifestyle of Jet Age feminism: they were now career women with unprecedented access to mobility, to greater sexual autonomy, and to amassing modest wealth for themselves, even as they embraced the long-standing expectation of cultivating their own feminine beauty. All the while, however, Joksimović subordinated choices like color and skirt length—at the knee, not above—to workers’ dignity, as one would expect of socialist-inspired design. In contrast, Balenciaga’s palette at Air France included uniforms in light blue and white that were difficult to keep clean and launder in a hotel sink. Moreover, to the modest extent that Joksimović’s touches of “grandiose exoticism” remained in the final product, the uniforms established an affinity with fashion from the Global South. In these ways, the JAT uniforms from 1975 were more than visual counterparts of Air France’s. In fact, Yugoslavia’s and Joksimović’s ideological investments were more global than those that influenced Balenciaga, Pucci, and the West’s other designers of Jet Age stewardess outfits.
That said, even this softer adoption of the West’s Jet Age feminism left Yugoslavia with a growing problem that was becoming increasingly global in scope: women were becoming more objectified as the 1960s progressed, more entrapped in what American Second Wave feminist Betty Friedan called the feminine mystique of being valued mainly for their beauty. Furthermore, women in Yugoslavia were increasingly frustrated with failures impacting their lack of equality that arose from within the socialist state itself: maternal leave plans, kindergartens, and day care centers all remained underfunded, while the state also failed to integrate women into some of the country’s highest-paying and most technically skilled professions, including piloting. These shortcomings made a mockery of the 1946 constitution and the socialist state’s supposedly all-out commitment to equality for women workers. Yugoslavia’s women were left underpaid, with few career options, and saddled with the unrealistic double burden of a full-time job and full-time family commitments. With the state’s embrace of Western-style sexual objectification in the 1960s, the list of women’s grievances grew, which in turn begot a new and more vocal wave of Yugoslav feminists. As in the West, Yugoslavia’s feminists found even greater urgency in the Jet Age to intervene against the worst outcomes of men’s sexual aggression: domestic abuse, rape, sexual harassment, and unwanted pregnancy.50
As with stewardesses in the United States and Western Europe, most JAT stewardesses themselves did not identify with this new wave of more radical feminism that was slowly taking hold. Instead, they were more allied in their hearts with Helen Gurley Brown’s “Cosmo girls”; they were typically happy with the guidelines set by JAT requiring them to be young and beautiful and commonly aspired in their work to emulate the moxie of Beba Lončar (who played the main character, Sonja) in Love and Fashion or even the more passive, more objectified beauty of the JAT stewardess played by Sophia Loren’s look-alike, Ljubica Otašević. Nonetheless, many of these women privately chafed against the unrealistic norms of Jet Age feminism and the shortcomings of the socialist state that made their work exceptionally challenging. On the outside, they were model cosmopolitans—Yugoslavia’s entrants into the global pageant of Jet Age feminism, if you will—but on the inside, they cleverly developed coping strategies to compensate for their insufficient pay and advancement opportunities, their lack of adequate childcare, and their frequent run-ins with unwelcome sexual advances and sexual abuse.