This chapter provides an overview of body image disorders as they pertain to men. Body image encapsulates thoughts, beliefs, and feelings about one’s physical appearance. For some men, these thoughts, beliefs, and feelings are neutral, or even positive. This is ideal, insofar as one’s body ought to be a functional and useful asset that allows an individual to live life on their own terms. Yet for others, these thoughts, beliefs, and feelings are decidedly negative.

This chapter centres on the airline poster image's double status: objective information and subjective fantasy or desire. The richness of airline posters in the early modern age of graphic reproduction (1920–50, with 1950–70 marking a transition period) is invariably a function of this double agenda. For the poster's aim is to portray an image that elicits from the viewer intense identification through both its formal structure and its ostensible content. In poster art, visual strategies are therefore developed to maximize viewer identification on both a rational and a fantasy level. Sometimes it is the appeal of the graphic image that fulfils desire while the textual component supplies the objective information. At other times, the textual message itself becomes as much a seductive agent as the image – as in those memorable and enticing slogans developed by many airline companies from the 1940s. Alternatively, in the most successful posters, it is the indissoluble combination of the two, text and image, that ensnares or enchants the viewer/reader who is invited to bring both textual and visual understanding to bear on the unravelling of the poster message. In this way the most persuasive posters mobilize a rhetoric of image-text that the very act of apprehension persuades the receiver to enter into, inviting them to enjoy the poster's creation of meaning as an enticing textual/visual game (see Scott, 2010).

It is the desire or fantasy aspect of the image that normally comes across as strongest in the travel poster. But there is always a risk attached to it. Whereas the objective, factual aspect of the poster information can be verified and is rarely problematic, the desire element is very much open to interpretation. The poster designer of course aims to control that interpretation (see Scott, 2010) so that it is correctly grasped. If he or she fails, the outcome can be disastrous, as in those posters in which the real/informational element of the poster fails to temper and control the fantasy element. A striking example of this is provided by one in a series of Australian Airlines posters of 1990, examined below, in which the real destination of the airline, though visually present, is upstaged or falsified by an attendant erotic scenario that was so misread by its intended audience that the poster had to be quickly withdrawn.

If as Oscar Wilde asserted ‘Dandyism is the assertion of the absolute modernity of beauty’, then glamour may be similarly defined in relation to feminine attractiveness. As a term, glamour began to be widely used after World War I with the rise of Hollywood cinema and still photography, and it implies a certain element of contemporaneous artificiality: make-up, hair styling, grooming, fashionable clothes are all important elements of glamorization. Although male film stars were submitted to a grooming almost as thorough as Hollywood goddesses, glamour nevertheless remains a primarily feminine attribute, although it can with a provocative edge also be applied to men, especially those who find themselves in the limelight of celebrity in sport or the entertainment business. Men in the public eye, like men in military uniform ready for inspection, have always been expected to look smart. When, in the twentieth century, women started wearing military uniforms (which apart from the substitution of skirts for trousers more or less followed the standard male pattern), masculine smartness became a prerequisite aimed in part at somewhat toning down feminine attractiveness. So early airline hostess outfits, when they were not, as they were in American airlines of the 1930s, modelled on nurses’ uniforms, exhibited a certain masculine severity (Figure 5.1) that was, however, softened by the pretty, discreetly made-up, feminine face.

The contrast between masculine uniform and feminine attractiveness is perfectly allegorized in an Ansett poster of c. 1960 (Figure 5.2) in which a pretty, blond, blue-eyed airhostess stands next to a stereotypically tall and handsome airline pilot. The pilot wears the dark uniform (emblazoned with medal stripes as well as wings), the white-topped cap and spotless white shirt and black tie of a naval captain. The hostess wears an outfit that is a kind of parody of a uniform in which the soft grey-green serge of the cap and jacket is set off by an open-collared off-white blouse (the tie was omitted from most airhostesses’ uniforms from c. 1950). The pilot's direct gaze and firm facial expression contrast with the hostess's soft blue eyes and broader smile.

As was noted in the introduction, the advent of modern colour photography and mass televisual information coincided with both the decline of the airline poster and the increased democratization of airline travel: the jet age and intense commercial competition have ushered in a very different approach to airline promotion from that of the pre-1960s. In the modern period air travel has become banal, a mass phenomenon, intrinsic to the global expansion of tourism as well as business; as Hudson and Pettifer confirm, for every one passenger in 1939, there were 1000 in 1979 (1979: 90). As a result, the images used to promote it draw increasingly on a standardized, internationalist repertory that one might find in any glossy magazine or journal and so lose much of the specific flavour and charm evident in posters produced for public display in a less democratic and homogeneous era. In an age when the concept of exoticism has become problematic – the modern air traveller being as likely as not to be him-or herself previously categorized as ‘exotic’ (i.e. non-Western) – it becomes increasingly difficult to romanticize travel destinations. The skyline and airport at the many scheduled points of arrival or departure are furthermore becoming more difficult to distinguish from each other. This is in particular true of the airport itself which is now generally recognized as being a non-lieu or non-place, that is, a site lacking in historical, cultural or individual significance: it is a place of banality, boredom and delay. The aircraft has in a similar way become emptied of individual character: all models, whether manufactured by Airbus or by Boeing, are virtually identical in appearance and are indeed very often not seen from the outside at all by their passengers who board them along a covered gangway. Plane-spotting, like trainspotting, has become a thing of the past. The focus on destination in its larger sense rather than itinerary has further reduced the imaginative appeal of travel and its scope for representation.

The text of Design in Airline Travel Posters opened with a comparison of two posters from two very different ages of airline travel, one from 1959 (a moment close to the chronological limit of this study) and one of 1990.

Airline posters of the interwar period of the twentieth century constitute as rich a source of insight into European colonialist propaganda as any other cultural production. As in postage stamps (see Scott, 1995: 73–85; 2002: 45–53), their primary function – a sign of mail and place of posting for stamps; a sign of destination and means of travel for airline posters – is supplemented more or less subtly by a range of colonialist themes including sexual voyeurism, exoticism, racial fascination and developmental zeal, designed to appeal to the Western (and in particular the Western male) viewer. These themes are mostly presented under the cover of a scientific alibi provided by ethnography, a discipline that burgeoned in Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, precisely as the continent's colonial enterprise was reaching its peak. Ethnographic study sets out to analyse and classify the variety of native types; their customs, myths and rituals; and their natural environment. The privileging of the naked or near-naked native body as a focus of attention activated a process that could become, when the images were decontextualized, as rich a source of imaginative reverie as of objective knowledge. Ethnographic discourse and visual documentation are thus prone to be used as a cover for sexual fantasy as well as for economic domination and racial prejudice. The aim of this chapter will be to explore the way such strategies are exploited in interwar French and British airline posters, using as a point of comparison the elaboration of similar themes in 1920s and 1930s stamps issued by these countries’ African colonies.

Although Africa (with the exception of Cape Town) lacks the glamorous cities of other equatorial, tropical or subtropical continents – Rio in South America, Hong Kong in the Far East, Sydney in Australia – it makes up for it by a multitude of destinations offering a range of exotic settings – jungle, river, lakeside village, palm-fringed shore. Such sites quickly became the staple settings of interwar airline poster images produced by Britain and France as they sought to give colour and substance to the strange names – Bamako, Dakar, Togo – that the colonial itineraries of their national airlines served. But the airline poster's main appeal was, as in the postage stamps of the interwar colonial period, primarily built around their presentation of native types – naked or semi-naked, male or female – involved in ritual or traditional activities.

Imperial Itineraries

The development from the 1920s of the classic continental or intercontinental itineraries by small but growing airlines was a response in particular to the need to provide rapid transport for both mail and passengers. For the victorious post-World War I European powers (Britain, France and the Netherlands) this meant servicing the routes to their imperial/colonial colonies and dominions as flown by Air Orient (later Air France), Imperial Airways (later BOAC) and KLM (Royal Dutch Airlines), while for American airlines (especially Pan American) it meant covering their sphere of influence with ‘Clipper’ services to South and Central as well as to North America, using both land and sea planes. At the same time, the growing demand on the part of a wider European and American public in the 1920s and 1930s for travel (business or pleasure-related) to the exotic parts of the world – India, Ceylon, Indonesia and to the colonial dominions in Africa, Australia and New Zealand – resulted in the establishment of a number of world-wide air networks. Very soon European airlines were claiming to travel to ‘All six continents’, to fly ‘Dans tous les ciels’ and generally reducing intercontinental travel times to a matter of days rather than weeks.

As a result of this, in the 1930s, the globe or map of the world naturally became a central motif in airline advertising, particularly for European airways. KLM, servicing Dutch interests in the Far East, in particular Indonesia, and in Europe, reminded the public through their posters of the extent and regularity of their flights. So, in a poster of the 1930s (Figure 2.1), a KLM Douglas DC 3 (Dakota) is seen flying above a globe on which are marked KLM routes from Amsterdam across Europe to Cairo, Bagdad, Karachi, Calcutta, Rangoon and Bangkok to the final destination in Batavia (which today we call Jakarta), a journey which in its entirety then took five and a half days, available in both directions twice weekly. A similar approach was taken by KLM to its European routes (Figure 2.2), which flew from Amsterdam as far south as Milan, especially when, after its launch in 1919, the service established its profile as a major continental airline, with regular flights from, for example, Amsterdam to London initiated as early as 1920.