Every couple of years there is a minor scandal when US carrier Southwest Airlines tells a female passenger she is too scantily clad to fly.
Ironic, perhaps, coming from an airline whose flight attendants used to wear hot pants, whose automated ticketing machines were called “Quickies” and snacks were dubbed “Love Bites.”
Nowadays, Southwest is your run of the mill low-cost carrier, headquartered in Dallas, Texas.
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But it is those Texan roots that set it apart in the early days. Southwest burst onto the scene in 1971 and the first uniform consisted of a "tangerine knit top, slouchy white belt, white side-laced go-go boots, and fire-orange hot pants," as Texas Monthly put it.
Lamar Muse, the president of Southwest Airlines at its inception, made sure they did things differently from minute one when – not long after the airline's first official flight – he had his 'hostesses' stick the finger up in a photograph he sent to a rival.
“Lamar had a way of getting you to do things you might not think you could,” said Sally Glenn, one of those hostesses, fifty years later.
Ray Trapp, an advertising executive, was tasked with setting the airline apart in the crowded industry.
"We felt the other carriers were stodgy. Southwest needed to be livelier,” he told the aforementioned title in July 2021.
He and a team from Bloom Advertising in Dallas developed 'a personality description model' that defined Southwest as a young woman.
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This lady is young and vital,” the model read. “She is charming and goes through life with great flair and exuberance … yet she is quite efficient and approaches all her tasks with care and attention.”
The team wanted to portray Southwest as "the love airline" in the wake of the hippy generation that still had a lingering effect.
No surprise, then, that tickets would come to be issued from "love machines", snacks would be "love bites," and the free in-flight drinks would be "love potions."
"We were going to look for hostesses who were fun and outgoing. They had to have a sense of humor. They had to have an engaging personality," Trapp recalled.
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To bag such hostesses, the company released an ad that probably wouldn't go down too well nowadays.
Using the name of a sex symbol American actress, it read: “An Open Letter to Raquel Welch…Ms. Welch: You typify the girls we’re looking for: Warm, personable, and great-looking in hot pants. … If you know of any other girls like you (at least 20 years old, 20/50 vision, without glasses, between 5’2” and 5’7”, 100-135 pounds) … would you please ask them to send us a brief statement of qualifications and a recent photograph?”
It generated 1,200 applications, one of which was Lamar Muse's daughter Debbie Muse Carlson
“You had to have great legs to be a hostess,” she said later.
Nowadays, the hotpants have been ditched but Southwest remains one of the major airlines of the United States2, and the world's largest low-cost carrier.
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