"Flying is awful, there's nothing to do when you're up in the air. I bloat up, my skin gets dry, and when we hit turbulence, I'm terrified"
About this Quote
Glamour has a favorite trick: it edits out the unphotogenic parts of being human. Daniela Pestova’s blunt complaint about flying punctures that illusion with almost comic precision. The voice isn’t poetic; it’s bodily. “I bloat up, my skin gets dry” is the language of someone whose livelihood depends on the surface of the body, suddenly forced into an environment that sabotages it. Air travel becomes a kind of anti-runway: fluorescent light, recycled air, dehydration, swelling. The subtext is that even the people we imagine as effortlessly polished are negotiating the same indignities, just with higher stakes.
The line “there’s nothing to do when you’re up in the air” carries a particular late-20th/early-2000s celebrity context: flying as routine labor, not luxury. Models are paid to be elsewhere, constantly, and the in-between time is dead time - hours where the usual tools of control (schedule, movement, mirror, team) don’t work. That boredom isn’t trivial; it’s a loss of agency.
Then she pivots from annoyance to fear: “when we hit turbulence, I’m terrified.” That admission reads like a small rebellion against the expectation that public figures perform composure. It’s also a neat compression of modern anxiety: you can intellectualize safety stats all day, but your body still flinches when the plane drops. Pestova’s intent feels less like confession for its own sake and more like demystification: the job may look airborne, but it still comes with the same shaking hands.
The line “there’s nothing to do when you’re up in the air” carries a particular late-20th/early-2000s celebrity context: flying as routine labor, not luxury. Models are paid to be elsewhere, constantly, and the in-between time is dead time - hours where the usual tools of control (schedule, movement, mirror, team) don’t work. That boredom isn’t trivial; it’s a loss of agency.
Then she pivots from annoyance to fear: “when we hit turbulence, I’m terrified.” That admission reads like a small rebellion against the expectation that public figures perform composure. It’s also a neat compression of modern anxiety: you can intellectualize safety stats all day, but your body still flinches when the plane drops. Pestova’s intent feels less like confession for its own sake and more like demystification: the job may look airborne, but it still comes with the same shaking hands.
Quote Details
| Topic | Travel |
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