Most vintage clothing collections build around a decade or a designer. @lilyslake has built hers around a single, highly specific category: flight attendant uniforms, and the latest piece in her collection dates all the way back to 1970.

“vintage uniforms part 2!!!!! stay tuned for the next uniform. this was from 1970,” she writes in the caption, tagging it with #vintage, #flightattendant, #aviation, and #psa, a reference to Pacific Southwest Airlines, the now-defunct California based carrier famous in aviation circles for its playful branding and its instantly recognizable smile painted on the nose of every aircraft.

@lilyslake

Pacific Southwest Airlines, often shortened to PSA, operated from 1949 until it was absorbed into USAir in 1988, and during its decades in the air it became known for uniforms that broke sharply from the buttoned-up, formal look most carriers favored at the time. PSA leaned into bright colors, mod cuts, and a lighthearted brand identity that matched the airline’s reputation for a looser, friendlier flying experience than its competitors. That design history is exactly why uniforms like the one in this video carry weight with collectors decades later: they represent a specific, well-documented moment in airline branding history rather than a generic vintage outfit.

Flight attendant uniforms occupy an unusual place in vintage fashion collecting. Unlike most clothing from a given decade, airline uniforms were produced for a specific workforce, distributed through employer channels rather than retail stores, and were typically either returned to the airline or discarded once an employee left the job or the airline changed its look. That combination makes surviving pieces considerably rarer than ordinary vintage clothing from the same era, and pieces that can be dated and attributed to a specific carrier and year, as this one is, tend to command real interest from aviation history collectors as well as vintage fashion collectors.

The “part 2” framing in the caption points to something collectors in this specific niche do often: building out a themed collection publicly, one piece at a time, rather than posting a single haul video. It turns the collection itself into a running series, with each new uniform adding to a visual timeline of how airline fashion shifted across decades, and it gives followers a reason to come back for the next installment rather than treating any single post as a one-off.

For collectors hoping to find something comparable, aviation uniform pieces most often surface through estate sales connected to former airline employees, specialty vintage dealers who focus on transportation and workwear history, and occasionally through airline retiree associations that sometimes deaccession archival pieces. Authenticating a specific uniform typically comes down to matching the fabric, insignia, and cut against documented photographs from the airline’s own employee manuals or archival marketing material from the period, which is part of why a precisely dated piece like this one stands out.

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