Ella Freire’s Pan Am Vintage Travel Tag Prints

I love these prints. There is just something about these vintage tags that carries a quiet kind of charm, like little artifacts pulled straight out of another era.

Ella Freire is a screen printing artist working out of her London studio, where she has spent the last 14 years building a practice shaped by classic cars, vintage cameras, and an incredible collection of 1960s and 70s bus and airline luggage tags, along with old train and bus tickets.

The Pan Am World Airways tags in particular sit right at the heart of the “Golden Age of Travel,” when flying still felt like glamour, optimism, and a passport into something bigger than everyday life. Back then, even baggage tags were designed with intention, becoming part of the branding language that marked passengers as global travellers during the 1950s through the 1970s, later evolving into colour-coded systems to help baggage handlers around the world, especially in multilingual environments.

A few years ago, Ella returned to her personal archive and really leaned into those Pan Am designs, drawn to their bold simplicity, clean graphics, and strong colour palette that still feels so fresh today. She began recreating them as large-scale prints, staying as close as possible to the originals, right down to the shape and perforated edges.

Each piece is printed on 100 percent cotton archival paper, then mounted, cut to shape, and finished with that familiar punched hole and reinforced tab, so they feel almost like they could be clipped onto a suitcase again. The editions are intentionally limited, just 25 per size, which adds to their collectability and sense of rarity.

Licensed by Pan Am Brands, her work has found its way into collections around the world and even into the Pan Am Museum Gallery in New York, while also expanding into other iconic names like American Airlines, TWA, and Braniff International.

According to their website, Pan Am today is being revived as a luxury, experiential travel brand rather than a traditional airline. Backed by Pan American Global Holdings and AVi8 Air Capital, the company is now focused on high-end, themed chartered journeys that retrace some of its most historic routes, leaning heavily into nostalgia and the romance of early jet-age travel.

Alongside the flights, there is also a clothing and lifestyle brand that extends the Pan Am identity beyond aviation, with plans that reportedly include hotel and lounge concepts, building out a broader world that feels inspired by its own past.

Her work continues to appear in major exhibitions, including The Other Art Fair in Chicago, alongside recognition such as the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London, with representation across the UK and the United States through galleries that continue to carry these nostalgic fragments of travel history into the present.