Fly like Turkey
When flight attendants first rode aboard Turkish Airlines in the late 1940s they wore cotton blouses under blue suits tailored to accentuate "the contours of the body," as a fashion history of the airline puts it. In the '60s and '70s the trend continued with fashions straight off the Paris runway, designed to show Turkey's European flair on its flagship airline.
Others slammed the new look as too conservative, a transparent effort to please the Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party headed by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The party's decade-long run in power has wrought changes in the traditionally secular culture, like the acceptance of Islamic head scarves in public and on college campuses and restrictions on alcohol in certain places.
"It is a reaction against imposing a certain lifestyle to all institutions in Turkey," said Ayse Saktanber, a sociologist at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. "Turkey is a pragmatic society which doesn't like to fall behind the world. These new costumes came with the alcohol ban on planes."
With Turkey's rise as an economic and political power over the past decade, tourism has soared. Feeding some of the backlash against the new uniforms is the fear that tourists, many of whom form their first impressions of Turkey on a Turkish Airlines flight, will get the wrong impression. And for all the talk of Turkey pivoting from the West and becoming a new leader of the Muslim world, the flight schedules tell a different narrative: in January nearly four times as many passengers flew to Europe as to the Middle East.