Don’t Dress Up to Travel, You’ll Spill Burrito on Yourself

There are those that advocate dressing up for airplane travel, harkening back to another time when people actually did dress up to travel. But in those days you also enjoyed hot food, cold beverages and service with a smile. These days, you’ve got take out burritos, cramped seats and surly travelers jockeying for carry-on space.

All of these things hardly make dressing up worthwhile. I mean, you would not want to get burrito drippings on your nice suit, would you?

Here’s the other thing: how comfy you dress should be directly proportional to how long the flight is. If you have a short flight, and need to go to, say, a meeting, directly from the airport, you should probably wear something a bit nicer than if you are going on vacation. This is doubly true if you are coming back from vacation. Then it is all downhill.

My general philosophy is that jeans or yoga pants (FKGuy is a jeans-wearer, whereas I am strict yoga pants kind of gal) are perfectly acceptable. For example, I have an upcoming flight from Nice to JFK (8+ hours) connecting to Miami. Total flying time is eleven hours. Rest assured I will be as comfortable as possible, typically in aforementioned yoga pants, and a thin long sleeve top, plus a jacket, as those cabins get chilly. Plus, it is the end of my vacation, and I will have limited clean clothing available, so I might be extra sloppy. I mean, comfortable. Fortunately, we had enough miles to secure business class tickets, so I won’t need any carry on burritos (or crepes, since we’ll be in France).

In the interest of comfort, I suggest my fellow women travelers wear a sports bra. Not the heavy-duty-run-a-marathon sports bra, but a nice, stretchy thing without wires. Underwires never did anyone any good in the air.

Socks are also helpful. As someone who does not wear socks unless absolutely necessary, you should always bring them with you when you fly. That way, you can easily take off your shoes and not freeze.

So, to those people that one must dress up to travel, I say: good for you. We can agree to disagree. You can mock my super comfortable yoga pants, while I giggle every time a drop of burrito hits your perfectly-ironed-ten-hours-ago-now-a-wrinkled-mess finery. Don’t come to me when you forget your Shout wipes, my clothes are all machine washable.