Exotic Runways Spanning the US and Latin America: Braniff Airways and “The End of the Plain Plane"

Abstract

The mid-sized Texas-based airline Braniff Airways aspired in 1965 to catch up to its competition by purchasing a new fleet of jet airplanes and thereby improve its market share, including on its international routes that linked the US with various cities in Mexico and South America. This article examines how the economic pressure of this substantial purchase led to a bold marketing campaign that ultimately re-styled air travel in the Jet Age from staid-but-sophisticated to colorful and glamorously trendy. This stylistic transformation involved a collaboration between three creative giants of the 1960s: advertising executive Mary Wells, fashion designer Emilio Pucci, and interior designer Alexander Girard. Both Pucci and Girard were particularly vital in creating a colorful, yet stylish image for Braniff that rendered a uniquely up-to-date sense of what Jet Age “modernity” would look like. At the same time, these designers consciously attributed their aesthetics to an embrace of “primitivism,” especially to the bright, geometric inspirations they found in pre-modern art from Latin American civilizations and others across the Global South.