Airport runway: flying’s new fashion aesthetic

Photographs by Elliott Morgan
Styling by Helen Seamons

But, perhaps those days are dying. This summer, fashion-minded travellers have been cultivating a new kind of “airport aesthetic”: a transit uniform defined by order and cosiness, which often combines high-street sweatshirt brands like Silver Fox and Parke with accessories from Prada and Louis Vuitton, sometimes throwing in perfectly plushy slides, puffer jackets and little cuddly Labubus hanging from a bag.

The airport aesthetic takes its cues from the “clean girl aesthetic” (a style which prizes low-key makeup and minimalist clothing) or the lifestyle of the “West Village girl”, a new kind of New York transplant that combines blue jeans, white tees, and a notably glass-half-full approach to life.

Summer on social media is usually dominated by photos of limpid blue lakes and pebbled beaches, but the airport aesthetic has given travellers the chance to start posting pictures before they’ve even reached their destination. You may have noticed it already: an Instagram story of a passport in a manicured hand; a friend curiously wearing their nicest oversized shirt in an airport selfie; the person in front of you taking a photo of their curated security tray before it goes through the scanner.

The airport aesthetic class has internalised the tenets of an ideal travel day – comfort, minimalism, casualness – and codified them into one distinct aesthetic, often heavily incorporating athleisure, which, over the past decade, has become day-to-day clothing. It began when the athletic clothing brand Outdoor Voices “made it OK to care about what you looked like when you worked out,” says Lauren Sherman, a fashion business reporter for the website Puck.

At the same time Kanye West and Kim Kardashian (and their brands Yeezy and Skims) took a fashion-forward approach to what previously carried the vaguely pejorative tag of “workout gear”.

Airport aesthetic is the legacy of that era, in that it celebrates, rather than just permits, comfortable, casual clothing by styling it with luxury accessories. To the untrained eye, these outfits might scan as banal, but there’s an IYKYK feeling to the way a nylon Prada bag is paired with a £30 Adidas sweatshirt.

In recent years, the lines between high and low have been blurring in fashion: editors and stylists covet rare pieces from Italian high street brand Brandy Melville as much as they do vintage Dior purses or Schiaparelli dresses; there’s also an appealing kind of humility to wearing, say, £7 shorts from Sports Direct after a fashion era defined by blingy logomania. For younger shoppers, a designer tote also provides a more accessible entry point to the luxury market – these items are widely available through secondhand retailers and, in many cases, have endured over decades.

Fiona Hartley, a creative content consultant at Balenciaga, says the airport aesthetic gives “Emily Oberg vibes” – the founder of athleisure brand Sporty & Rich, who is also an influencer in her own right, is famous for performing a version of female entrepreneurship that is more about luxury than the endless cut-throat grind. In the same way that many young people want to be influencers when they grow up, they aspire, too, to the lifestyle Oberg leads: one that seems easy and effortless, but still rooted in work culture. In this sense, airport aesthetic taps into the root of every fashion trend: fantasy. It’s thrilling to dress as if you might be going to an important business meeting, as opposed to being on a £46 EasyJet flight to some cursed family reunion. Ch’lita, a London-based editorial stylist for magazines like Arena Homme+, travels abroad weekly and says she’s “guilty” of dressing aspirationally at the airport. “Many treat the liminal travel space as a runway,” she says. There’s nothing to do at an airport except walk and wait – meaning there’s a lot of idle time to imagine you’re somebody else. The experience is about “posturing to strangers who you might be and where you could be going. You never know who you might meet at these international junctions.”

This idea fits into the image that Oberg and Kardashian sell – that being “on the go” is an inherent part of a contemporary luxury lifestyle. Many of us have internalised this idea. In 2022, the New York Times reported that an increasing number of people are building a visit to a luxury airport lounge into their holiday. The journey is as important an investment as the destination. In the 1980s and earlier, passengers “dressed nicely” (slacks, collars, no jeans) in the hope of being upgraded to business class when they travelled – essentially, to look important.

Upgrades, now in the hands of algorithms, are inconceivable on budget flights, but the same impulse remains. Except today, pairing a Parke sweatshirt with Bottega slides is what conveys status.

There is a certain appeal to looking like you’ve got your shit together enough to pair a Rimowa suitcase with Alo Yoga sweats. Airport aesthetic may seem like it has a lot in common with “sad beige” culture – the rise of neutral tones in clothing and interior design – but it also shares DNA with things like “off-duty model style” (outfits inspired by models like Bella and Gigi Hadid and Kendall Jenner when they’re not on the runway) and “quiet luxury”, which seeks to telegraph wealth through minimalism and a pure, unadulterated sense of comfort. Both those trends were powerful because of implication, not because the clothes themselves made any outright statements.

Although many long for the era of air travel where everyone dressed presentably, comfort itself is the ultimate luxury right now: almost everyone under the age of 30 dresses better than their damp, pokey flatshares would suggest; in the evening, they take off their nice clothes and climb into a bed that’s creaky and absolutely criminal for their backs.

You can see, then, the appeal of planning and styling an airport outfit, especially in an era where looking comfortable and relaxed is associated with wealth and status: for those three hours in duty-free you could be going anywhere. It’s both horribly depressing and totally understandable that many would choose to use that kind of freedom to seem casual, unbothered and swaddled, both literally and figuratively – things that are increasingly difficult to come by for young people, who have grown up in a near-constant state of precarity and political chaos. And where young people go, the rest follow.

Add to this the fact that flying now feels more unsafe than ever, thanks to a series of bizarre and terrifying crashes at the beginning of the year, and it makes even more sense why many would try to aestheticise and narrativise their own travel in this way.

Airport aesthetic associates ambition with comfort and suggests that strict, stuffy dressing is no longer the only way to convey seriousness. With any luck, this trend will soon spread to other discomfiting liminal spaces, like the peak-time commute, and beyond. During a time in which most people feel like they’re going nowhere, a little extra comfort is the least they deserve.

Opening image: MacBook Air by Apple; Speedmaster watch by Omega; passport wallet by Balenciaga; earbuds by Bang & Olufsen; belt by Dunhill; trainers by Puma; SPF sun drops by Dr Barbara Sturm; lip balm by Malin+Goetz; and Colonia Club Cologne by Acqua di Parma

Fashion assistant: Sam Deaman