Yes, you have to line the pockets of a Tory donor to get a test, and yes, your frontal lobe is still excruciatingly probed via a very reluctant nostril, but travel, for the most part, is back. How we've longed for it. There's the promise of an overpriced gin and tonic, no matter what hour it is, and a blurry stamp in your passport, and a few days or weeks beyond these ashen shores. But this excitement doesn't equate to glamour. Though air travel has been ring fenced for the best part of two years, the anticipation hasn't returned the Seventies pomp and pageantry to the departure lounge. It's not an event like it once was. Instead, it is a grey marled sea of sweatpants, cotton chinos and the odd peacock who decides to wear every single designer piece at once. Tis a pity they're not decked out in Casablanca – not yet, anyway.
The enduring brand of the moment has landed its unique strain of cotton candy Liberace in Charles de Gaulle Airport, with Seventies jet set glamour in its crosshairs for autumn/winter 2022. Interestingly enough, the brainchild of former Pigalle creative director Charaf Tajer swerved the actual runway at Paris Fashion Week to release a six minute short film around the airport runway instead. Sex Education's Emma Mackey leads a troika of Chanel-like flight attendants around a beiged out departure lounge. Passengers wear marbled sunglasses indoors. There are sweatpants – full tracksuits, even – but they're immaculately tailored, and complete with fancy things like continental ties and Almost Famous sherpa coats and knitted polos and diamond white overcoats with fang-like lapels. In the pop cultural consciousness, this is what international travel looked like back then; fabled, glamorous, but also too distant in history and memory to not feel slightly surreal. Casablanca has plugged the gaps with even more fantasy, more retrofuturist touches, more in-flight champagne. So Seventies it is that model Richard Biedul is actually using a public payphone (in a Casablanca monogrammed tracksuit, naturally).
After paying tribute to Monaco racers and Val-d'Isère during the Charles-Diana epoch, this veneration of air travel's golden age was inevitable. It's a natural fit for Casablanca too. The brand's laissez-faire approach to glamour has priority booking in somewhere as mystical as it is mundane. Highlights, once again, include oversized hold-alls in white leather (a cash cow in waiting for Casablanca), and the launch of the marque's first in-house sneaker, the Atlantis. It is, again, quite Seventies, and plates a sculptured track silhouette with coral-like rubber. Following New Balance collabs that quickly turned into StockX gold dust, it makes perfect sense for a designer like Tajer, with his streetwear pedigree, to cement Casablanca's place in the sneaker canon.
But most importantly, this stuff is fun. Though Casablanca takes the alchemy of glamour very seriously, there's levity here. It wants you to have fun when playing fancy dress as a Milanese magnate in Heathrow Terminal 2, to remember a time when captains shared hotels rooms with air hostesses, and people smoked on a 9 hour flight, and getting paralytic was not only acceptable but encouraged in the cabin. Sure, the reality of all that was, probably, a little bit gross. But Casablanca prefers to function on the fantasy of it all, and soon enough, we'll be checking in.
