The Jet Set: Sex, Glamour, and Global Power, 1955–78

This paper examines the history of a cultural idiom – the “jet set,” a term coined by an American gossip columnist in the early 1960s – in the context of the postwar global expansion of U.S. military and economic power. By analyzing representations of the jet set in U.S. culture, I argue that mass air travel both troubled and reified the boundaries of national identity.

When the U.S. airline industry introduced passenger jets in the late 1950s, the aircraft quickly became icons of cosmopolitanism. Jet travel appeared to diminish the salience of national borders, inspiring new transnational identities, cultures, and styles. The jet even helped to globalize the United States: New York’s Puerto Rican community, for example, resulted largely from an aerial migration in the late 1950s. Cultural representations of the “jet set”– in movies, print media, and travel advertisements – were fantasies of cosmopolitanism that glamorized the activities of high-flying, multiple-passport-carrying elites. While economy-class jet-setters like the Puerto Rican migrants were less visible, they, too, forged cosmopolitan identities, thus expanding the class parameters of the dominant idiom.

Yet the jet also helped reify the boundaries of the nation. In nationalist narratives, aviation exemplified American greatness. The United States’ aerospace industry, unrivaled in the world, played a central role in its postwar military and economic expansion. Cultural representations of the jet set, moreover, were also fantasies about power. The airline industry consciously marketed air travel as an expression of class and gender privilege: demure, attractive stewardesses would cater to passengers’ needs while the jet itself was capably flown by an older white male. The heterosexualization of mass air travel normalized, and glamorized, the aerospace industry. Jets contributed to the global expansion of U.S. power; the cultural idiom of the jet set made that power look sexy and natural.