How to dress for air travel

Even though I fly a lot, I retain the notion that air travel should be treated as a special occasion for which one should dress accordingly.

I am writing this from Gatwick, accompanied by one of those canvas bags you get for a fiver at Sainsbury’s

Back in the day, if you showed up looking as though you’d made a bit of a sartorial effort, the check-in person might pick up the phone, announce to reservations that a Mr Sutherland was ‘SFU’, and would rip up your boarding pass to replace it with a nicer one. In airline argot, SFU stood for ‘Suitable for Upgrade’.

Now that upgrades almost never happen, it won’t be long before people start turning up in dressing gowns. And, though I hate to say it, one of the best tips for modern airline travel is to wear naff clothes. Stout brogues and other leather-soled shoes have a metal bar between the sole and heel which sets off metal detectors – and they are lethal on wet tiled floors.