The US transport secretary is right: airport dress code matters
Travel by aeroplane was once regarded as a special occasion and passengers dressed accordingly. Men wore suits and ties. Women had their hair done. There is, somewhere, a photo of me as a baby that was taken before boarding a long-haul flight with my mother in 1969: we look as though we’re about to be presented to royalty.
As Americans fly across the country following their Thanksgiving celebrations, the US secretary of transportation, Sean Duffy, has signalled that he wants to revive these sartorial standards. He has been enjoining US air passengers to smarten themselves up. “Let’s try not to wear slippers and pyjamas as we come to the airport,” he said this week. A video accompanying Duffy’s request links dishevelled deportment with slovenly comportment.
It is not an easy thing to admit of a politician whose CV includes stints as a competitive lumberjack, a reality-TV star and a Fox News presenter but Duffy is absolutely right. An attitude exists among a hefty plurality of the travelling public that once security is cleared, normal conventions of civilised behaviour are suspended.
Airports – and aeroplanes – have become adult crèches, populated by grown-ups acting like toddlers: sprawling across furniture, broadcasting noise from electronic toys and straining petulantly against rules imposed for their own safety. As Duffy notes, many also dress like toddlers (though I would submit that many denizens of the modern departure lounge are much less sprucely turned out than I was when taking my first flight).
Duffy’s motivations are not wholly cosmetic. “I would encourage people to maybe dress a little better, which encourages us to maybe behave a little better,” he said this week. This is a serious concern. Reported incidences of US flights being disrupted by unruly passengers have declined since the astonishing post-pandemic peak of 2021, when numbers were up nearly 500 per cent on 2019’s figures, but they are still much higher than they were in the 2010s. Across the Atlantic, the EU’s Aviation Safety Agency estimates that a flight in European skies is disrupted by someone acting up an average of eight times per day. Perhaps there would be less of this if people were worried that the collar of their shirt would be torn off when the police grasped it.
As usual with appeals to our better natures, Duffy’s pleas will only be heeded by those who least need to hear it. It is the airlines upon whom he should be leaning. They regulate every other aspect of our time in their care so there is no reason why that should not include dress codes. On one recent long-haul flight, the seat across the aisle from me was occupied by a man well into middle age, wearing a singlet, shorts and sandals – the last of which, with wretched inevitability, he soon removed.
Andrew Mueller is the host of ‘The Foreign Desk’ on Monocle Radio and a regular Monocle contributor. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today. Further reading? From dressing smarter onboard to smarter planes, Gabriel Leigh learns how aviation’s future won’t just be won in the sky – it starts with rethinking everything on the ground. Read it here.
