First it took hold at New York Fashion Week. Black feathers spilling out the front of a beige car coat at Brandon Maxwell. An Altuzarra knit two-piece that made its wearer look like they had been tarred and feathered, but beautifully rather than as some heinous ancient punishment. A strapless gown that appeared cloud-like through rows and rows of delicate white plumes at Prabal Gurung.
The London shows were in on the game too — the cascading, multi-colored plumage of a Roksanda evening gown, or feral, feather-stuffed Converse high tops at Oscar Ouyang. In Paris, designers moved with the synchronization of a swallow murmuration. Pierpaolo Piccoli’s proposition for Balenciaga rested on feather-work: There was the full, plume-covered maxi skirt paired with a casual T-shirt, since worn in the wild by Elle Fanning, as well as a number of boxy dresses finished with delicate feather trims.
For Chanel, Matthieu Blazy set its specialist atelier Maison Lemarié on the task of creating feather Camellias, headpieces, earrings and large skirts. At Victoria Beckham the dresses were smaller, but no less quilled. Even The Row, the cult favorite of every millennial minimalist, dipped its toe into the showy textile with mid-length skirts that were given a feathery facade. Stella McCartney, fashion’s stalwart eco-warrior, joined in too with the invention of the world’s first plant-based alternative to feathers.
There was Big Bird Energy all over the runways this season. But how did bird feathers become a symbol of luxury in the first place?
Plumage has been in fashion since ancient Egypt, when ostrich feathers were used to decorate fans and even appeared in hieroglyphics. In Babylonian and Assyrian artworks, too, feathers are often seen covering the bodies of deities or embellishing royal crowns.
Around the mid-1500s, feathers entered the wardrobes of real people, at least in the UK. “That’s when they start to be worn specifically for fashionable reasons,” said Dr. Elisabeth Gernerd — a fashion historian and professor at De Montfort University in England. The ever-practical Brits worked with what they had to hand; attaching goose, chicken and egrets feathers that had been sterilized in chalk and sulfur to hats and fans. But while the material was fairly common, working people often reserved it for more everyday tools like making brooms or bedding.
18th century trend-setter Marie Antoinette popularized the style of having large, stately plumes — usually ostrich, the most prominent feather globally traded — erupting from a tower of hair. So giant were these headpieces, newspapers at the time often wrote salaciously about whose feathers caught fire from a candlelight at which ball. But it wasn’t until the 19th century, as the British Empire expanded and global trade routes became more established, that the “feather craze” reached its peak, according to Gernerd.
Birds of paradise from islands such as New Guinea were hunted and skinned, then exported to Europe and the US, where they were sold to milliners at auctions in London, Paris and Amsterdam. Their exotic feathers became associated with a new level of luxury and access. “In the 19th century, the Empire was in fashion and feathers are a way to display that fashion,” said Gernerd. “You’re wearing something that has travelled thousands of miles to get to you. You’re a symbol of growing Imperialism and trade.”
It wasn’t just the odd plume, either. Entire hummingbirds were taxidermied and mounted on circular, feathered fans in the 1870s; while larger preserved birds adorned velvet bonnets. By the 1900s, millions of birds had been killed for the feather trade, threatening the extinction of several species. Demand was so high, the millinery industry was even pricing out American ornithologists from buying specimens for scientific research. When the Titanic sank in 1912, one of the most valuable commodities onboard was a container of ostrich feathers being shipped to New York. “They were insured for around $2.3 million in today’s money,” Gernerd said. “They were worth essentially as much as diamonds.”
