Sitting on a plane is one of the life's necessary but unpleasant discomforts, hours and hours of bad films and over-the-counter medication and eavesdropping and worrying about deep-vein thrombosis. Even if you're travelling first-class – which Oscar winner Cate Blanchett no doubt does – and you have one of those pods that allow you to stretch out all the way, the air is all weird and it's usually really cold.

So what you need, obviously, is a soothing tracksuit and if you're too famous or too proud to wear a tracksuit, you need some sort of fashion approximation of  a tracksuit. A grey marl T-shirt, a cashmere sweater and some slouchy boyfriend jeans in the softest denim money can buy.    

But Blanchett, never a woman to shrink from a potentially difficult look, decided to buck all that boring sensible comfort stuff and opt for a fierce safari look when she travelled to Los Angeles from New York yesterday.

The look, although intimidatingly stylish, is troublesome for several reasons. It induces wriggles of discomfort just looking at it.

The blazer, a Stella McCartney number with snakeskin-effect lapels, is cream, and on planes you are expected to eat and drink even as the world around you lurches up and down. So there are spillages. So cream forces you to turn down the free ice-cream and snacks.

The trousers are suitably slouchy but look closer and you'll see they show crease marks. After a few hours sitting on a plane, the crotch area of those is going to be wrinkled and misshapen, saggy like elephant skin. Mark my words.

The shoes are flat, which obviously makes sense as plane travel always demands more much walking than you would expect, but thong sandals are deceptively uncomfortable. That wedge of leather between her big toe and the next one is going to start to chafe at some point. 

The bag, a very smart Tods Sella shopping bag in black and cream, new for autumn 13, is perfect for a lunch meeting but when you're travelling you often need your bag to double as a pillow and this one looks too hard to rest your head on.   

Here's hoping she had a onesie stashed in her carry-on.