Pan Am is back, but not exactly how you might remember it. Pan Am airways landed for its final time, bankrupt in the 90's selling its assets to Delta. After several reorganizations and name rights sales Pan Am has been reinvented as a brand that will harken us back to the glamorous days of flying, when hot food was set upon your tray table and you dressed-up for the airport.
Some of the bags we had on set.
Now selling travel accessories and gifts, Pan Am even has it's own TV show starring the lovely and strange Christina Ricci. It focuses on the lives of stewardesses and their adventures in passion, jealousy and espionage at 30,000 feet.
I was commissioned by Pan Am to help promote their line of retro travel bags by tying onto our memory of sleek, 60's era travel, though not with jumbo jets, but classic cars.
I was very young in the 70's just when all the great 50's and 60's design styles were being remodeled out. Though the memory of those clean rich lines are forever engraved in my mind as a kind of feeling. I remember flying those now defunct carriers like Eastern and Braniff and getting to visit the cockpit, mid-flight. The copilot pinning a pair of plastic wings to my proud cardigan. Making pictures with these design styles sure brings back some fuzzy feelings, like the muffled sound of afternoon soap operas filtered through shag carpeting while I napped. Oh, the age of innocence.
I'm not really that short. Really.
Shooting at a small airport outside of Chicago, we slathered on sunblock and shot images about a woman in a hurry to get the hell out! In the image above, she hits a snag in her plans on her way to who know where. Clothes were styled by the ever over-delivering Heather Brooks. Hair and make up by my new friend Cindy Schute.
A pristine 60's MGA with blood red leather interior. Droool.
Retouching and production stills by Tim Blokel
