At right is Kyla Ebbert, who was accosted and lectured, by a Southwest Airlines "customer service" attendant named Keith, for being inappropriately dressed for a flight. Here's the outfit she was busted for on a flight boarding in San Diego for Tucson. Photo by the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Not being excessively well-informed on the nuances of fashion (when that big fat 47-pound fashion magazine arrives in my Sunday paper, it immediately goes plop unread into the recycling, along with the startlingly unfunny Funny Pages), I'm always amazed by the world of fashion and the self-important dweebs who populate it.
Just yesterday, I was walking through Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan, early for an appointment and looking forward to sitting on a bench in the sun to flip through my free copy of the New York Post. They're now handing that poor sad paper out free on the street corners even by lunchtime, I might add. Used to be before 4 p.m. you'd have to pay a quarter.
Anyway, there were no places to sit. The damned Fashion Week festival was upon us again, like flu season, and the open-lawn beauty of Bryant Park was obliterated by those big white tents set up for the fall fashion shows. All over Bryant Park, which usually draws a pleasant crowd of regular people, were those invincibly smug nitwits from the fabulous fashion world, bustling here and there, air-kissing like the world was ending, while the rest of us, unable to find a bench to read the damned New York Post, wished only that they'd go back with their precious passes and tote bags to their one-bedroom apartmments in Park Slope whence they came.
I did see one young woman from the industry who had on a tight tee-shirt that had these words: "Please Don't Feed the Models." That was worth the trip, since I had never heard the wisecrack before, but my wife informed when I recounted this at breakfast this morning that "Please Don't Feed the Models" is an old Fashion Week tee-shirt gag. "It's sooooo 2005," she said while hand-feeding Cream of Wheat to our African gray parrot.
But I digress.
Here is the column, by Gerry Braun in the San Diego Union-Tribune, about the snippy Southwest Airlines busybody who is enforcing his own dress codes. (Astonishingly, Southwest also appears to be defending the clearly indefensible.)
This occurred in San Diego, on a flight to Tucson, my adopted second city. Nobody in beautiful, laid-back Tucson enforces fashion codes, by the way. That would explain why I happen to own three cowboy hats.
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1 comment:
I fly almost twice a week in and out of SAN have had my share of tete a tete with folks like Keith, but he's in the minority when it comes to Southwest employees.
Most of the SWA ground and air folks bend over backwards to be nice, kind, considerate and helpful.
In this case, the airline is wrong. The woman is not dressed improperly for where she is or where she was going. My wife, and some team members for my business would be dressed the same if they were flying to Tucson.
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