JetBlue Pretends It's the 1960s With a Retro Logo, Pop-Up Store and Airplane

Few airline routes evoke the golden age of flying quite like New York City to Palm Springs. And to celebrate new seasonal service along that route, JetBlue jumped back to the 1960s this weekend—with a "Time Travel Agency" pop-up store in NYC, a retro version of its logo (with ads to boot) and even a specially painted throwback airplane.

The pop-up store opened Friday on Wooster Street in SoHo, the same storefront where the carrier built an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine earlier this year. The Time Travel Agency, created by JetBlue agency MullenLowe, featured period characters and furniture, as well as 1960s fare deals and other giveaways.

It closed Saturday, so you'll have to pay 2016 prices if you missed out.

The installation included a four-page Wooster Street Journal newspaper, mocked up like a mid-1960s edition, and some other fun collateral.

In addition, and also playing on the airline industry’s retro fascination, JetBlue has given one of its jets a retro paint job. JetBlue designers spent days at New York's Lubalin Archive at the Cooper Union, researching ads, graphics, images and fonts from the '60s.

"The 1960s were rich with sleek but bold graphics and style—characteristics of today's JetBlue brand," says Jamie Perry, vp of marketing of JetBlue. "With that in mind our team broke from our tradition of timeless designs and instead imagined a look to celebrate this iconic era of aviation and what JetBlue may have looked when it would have been introducing humanity to air travel."

The inaugural flight to Palm Springs last Friday was also quite a production, featuring a runway show with custom crew member uniforms, T5 original flight attendants, special members of the TWA Clipped Wings club and fashions by Palm Springs-based fashion designer Trina Turk.

The retro vibe is great. To fill it out, they should have also temporarily reopened the Eero Saarinen-designed TWA terminal at JFK, which sits right next to JetBlue's Terminal 5. Maybe next time.