Where's glamour gone?

You know what's missing from the world today?

Glamour.

You can see it (or the lack of it) everywhere – spheres of culture and economics that used to be hotbeds of glitz have been transformed.

Take air travel. There's a scene in Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can where Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) sneaks onto a plane posing as a pilot by looking the part – walking through the airport surrounded with beautiful air stewardesses who look like they just stepped out of the pages of a glossy fashion magazine. People stop to stare as they pass. Jaws drop at such clean, pristine perfection. Everything about air travel used to be about prestige.

Today, after years of economic transformation (and several bouts of economic carnage) and a vastly different business model thanks to the low cost carriers, planes today are little more than flying buses.

The whole mystique about air stewardesses being blonde-tressed, shiny-toothed angels of the air is long gone. The ones who are still female are more like school matrons on most airlines, and their idea of service is quite different than those long legged beauties leaning down to fill up a champagne glass with a dazzling smile.

If you're old enough to remember catching a plane in the 1970s you'll know people used to get dressed for it. Not in their Sunday best, mind, but look at the people standing in check in queues in airports today. There are so many thongs, singlets and boardshorts it looks like the ice cream queue at the beach.

We do that because we know there'll be no glitz to be found once we board – many airlines are so strapped for profits the fittings and fixtures haven't been changed since the 1990s.

The carpet's frayed, there are still ashtrays in the armrests, TV screen lowers out of the ceiling so everyone has to watch the same rubbish family film with the swear words cut out.

We stuff ourselves like sardines into seats that have lost more and more leg and head room throughout history, and we eat barely digestible slop you wouldn't pay $2.99 for on the ground because we're driven insane with boredom and discomfort.

Then when we get out at the airport at the other end, we'll meet as much glitz and glamour as a sports stadium after the game is over, probably with a little bit of vomit on the seats and everything.

Even pilots themselves are no more those polished, poised gentlemen of yore like Leo's character in Catch Me If You Can. I have a friend who flies the biggest, most advanced passenger aircraft in the world, the A380, between Sydney and London. Because he doesn't work for one of those ultracheap airlines (where the pilot's likely to break up a beer brawl), he can't get enough work and is barely paying his bills.

We used to assume pilots were well paid and taken care of, that they were happy and confident and in control. When we were sitting behind them in a plane we often prayed they were like that.

Now a few generations of transparency about lax safety standards, a few pilots going public about the appalling pay and conditions and movies like Flight that show the men and women with our lives in their hands as screwed up and depressed as any of us have made the cultural perception of the airline pilot quite different. Miners are likely to earn more money – in fact in Australia they're the only ones earning any money.

Here's another glaring example; Hollywood. There used to be a guy on Australian TV introducing movies called Bill Collins. I was a kid so I don't know if he's even still alive after all this time, let alone working. He's the sort of film critic there used to be a professional class of film critics was all we had, not armies of scruffily bearded kids running blogs.

Collins was the kind of guy who used to love everything made before 1965 and hate everything since, and his spot was called The Golden Years of Hollywood. I loved James Bond like most kids, and my introduction to the ones that predated my own existence was through Bill Collins.

At the time movies and Hollywood seemed all about tuxedoes and prestigious cars lining up at film premieres, stars smoking cool cigarettes and drinking martinis. Collins himself seemed all about that, with his smart suit and gilt-edged studio set. There was a professional class of person who worked in the film industry, and it was all about glitz.

What's changed that? A kid who picks up a $100 camcorder, shoots a movie in his backyard and today makes $100m blockbusters in the studio system. That's a figurative metaphor, but it's accurate. There'd be a time stars would be limo-driven from one party, event and shoot to the next wearing a sharp suit. At least, that was the illusion Hollywood crafted.

Today, it's not unusual to see superstars who earn multimillion-dollar salaries looking like homeless ex roadies, even in professional capacities while promoting films.

Of course, ostentatious displays of wealth have been very out of vogue for 20 years or more. There have been some very painful economic downturns in the memories of people still in the workforce right now, and coddled superstars swanning around on beaches in Belize enjoying the perks of a lavish lifestyle we secretly know they don't really deserve is kind of distasteful.

They know that and they know their appeal today is to appear just like us, hence taking every opportunity to tell reporters they live normal lives, take their kids to school, etc etc. Most multi-million dollar directors are closer in spirit to kids running around their backyards with cameras than the Alfred Hitchcocks, John Fords and Billy Wilders of the world.

It's true that we still have the statue of the lamb of pop culture, something false for us to worship even though we know she's a false god (Kardashian, Hilton et al). They lead lavish lifestyles and flaunt them shamelessly because it's part of the business model, and we hate them for it as much as we love them.

Surely that's part of the reason why pop culture figureheads like Kim Kardashian are so adored when honestly, we all know how dumb, talentless, etc she really is. It sounds ridiculous but if anything, the Kardashians are old Hollywood, the gilded class who flaunts wealth shamelessly as an aspirational totem for the rest of us.

Here's another example – magazine publishing.

In the postwar years there were few more glamourous occupations as working behind the doors of a glossy magazine. We still look on the industry with rose coloured glasses today (just look at heroines in pop culture fixtures like Sex in the City and The Devil Wears Prada, who are paid writers for hip magazines). The field swirled with terms that carried serious weight among the creative class, 'advertising', 'art direction', 'editorial'.

But today the technology that's wrought such changes on Hollywood is eviscerating the magazine industry like it did the music industry. Today magazine publishing gives you two choices – sit around with your head down until you get retrenched, or throw in the towel and freelance on a promise of regular work from a former colleague (which won't last) or try and get more than 20 crummy cents a word out of a host of publications who have 'no freelance budget'.

Now, before I go further, some clarifications.

First, I'm not sexist enough to suggest airline cabin crew should all be tall, blonde, leggy and female. They shouldn't even be all female. And hiring young hot chicks to be flight attendants is an abhorrent practise even if it would have resulted in only young, hot chicks serving you drinks on planes.

It's also a good thing airline travel has become so cheap. I wouldn't have been able to go anywhere near the places I've been on my income in the 80s or before. I'm sure there's going to be a monumental error because of cost cutting that will result in hundreds of deaths (if there hasn't been already), but it's a similar argument to the contention that we should ban cars because they kill so many people.

And I'm all for the possibility of kicking the doors of Hollywood in with talent alone. I don't have anything approaching the credentials to be a professional film critic or journalist, but I am one through a combination of talent, persistence and sheer arse (and also because many of the media I started writing for were as irrelevant as I was). I could step from one to the next through a ladder of achievement to the big leagues that simply didn't exist before. There was a time you had to be born into the big leagues or have a connection (I had neither), or be far luckier than I am.

The other huge caveat is that I've been alive long enough to know the healing power of nostalgia. Everything – everything – is said to be getting worse. Ask anyone in any industry and they'll tell you the heyday was about 10-20 years ago (no matter when you ask them), and it's just not the same any more.

Maybe planes were actually less comfortable then. They were full of smoke, for one thing. Maybe air stewardesses were dragons like they are now, and they were only ever leggy blondes in advertising and media – the only field for which we have a fossil record of those days.

Stars and celebrities were certainly as boorish, drunk, badly behaved and undeserving of all their fame and money as they are now. You could see it every time a studio closed ranks around a misbehaving star or scandal and launched a press lockdown. It was far easier to keep things out of the press than it is today, and the public (aided by magazines, ironically – the only ones selling) didn't have such an insatiable thirst to see the mighty fall. Despite how much stars want to appear human, there's nothing we love more today than them proving their humanity by doing something stupid.

Maybe all that glamour was a carefully crafted illusion and now that we live in a transparent age we're much more in control of our choices as consumers and citizens.

But every time I go to an airport, I can't help wishing just one six foot blonde amazon with a gleaming smile and one of those little pillbox hats would traipse through in her high heels and leave awe and envy in her wake.