A spending budget airline in Ukraine is ditching its old uniform of higher heels and pencil skirts for females staff for a more comfy option. SkyUp Airlines, founded in 2016, is one of the youngest low-expense airlines in Ukraine, but currently one of its most significant. The airline stated it is providing crew members the selection of wearing sneakers and trousers on board following surveying the employees and discovering that female staff have been “fed up” with higher heels, pencil skirts and tight blouses.
“Twelve hours on your feet, flying from Kyiv to Zanzibar and back. If you wear high heels, you are hardly able to walk afterwards,” flight attendant Daria Solomennaya, 27, told the BBC. “That includes four hours of security checks and cleaning.”
Besides contributing to wellness problems — “Many of my colleagues are permanent clients of podologists; their toes and toe-nails are constantly damaged by high heels,” flight attendant Daria Solomennaya stated — there are other difficulties with tight skirts and heels.
Flight attendants may have to rush to open an exit door more than a wing if a plane tends to make an emergency landing on water. To do so, they would have to clamber more than men and women – “Imagine how I could do that in a pencil skirt,” Ms Solomennaya stated.
But SkyUp has made a welcome transform. According to a press release, the airline’s passengers will quickly be greeted by flight attendants wearing the new SkyUp Champions uniform. The uniform contains the Nike Air Max 720 sneakers rather of higher heels – footwear that feature “incredible cushioning and resilience for maximum comfort all day long.”
The airline stated it is also ditching suits and skirts for “trouser suits with soft tailoring aesthetics and trench coats.”
To come up with these new uniforms, it studied the evolution of cabin crew uniforms from the early 1930s.
“Times have changed, women have changed, so in contrast to the conservative classics, heels, red lipstick and a bun, a new, more modern and comfortable image of a ‘champion’ has appeared,” stated Marianna Grigorash, Head of SkyUp Airlines Marketing Department, when explaining the notion behind the new orange-coloured uniforms.
“The study and interviews with flight attendants became the starting point for working on a new image…So we decided to replace the shoes with sneakers.”
Ms Grigorash told BBC that the corporation realised its female employees did not want to be seen as “sexualised and playful”.