The fashion for feathers was more than just a moment of madness. For over half a century, from the 1870s to the 1920s, whatever your class, it was de rigeur to deck your hat with plumage, wings and entire birds. Parrots from the jungles of Borneo were paraded on the streets of Mayfair. Hummingbirds were worn in East End gin palaces. Not even the garden robin was safe.
Species around the world were being brought to the brink of extinction, with London as the world’s feather bourse. Plumage was shipped by the ton to the capital, unpacked and displayed in giant warehouses before monthly auctions.
On 21 March 1888, the biggest plumage sale yet recorded was held in the London Commercial Sales Rooms in Mincing Lane. The catalogue contained the following:
- 16,000 packages of snowy egret, peacock, argus pheasant, duck and heron.
- 8,000 parrots
- 1,000 impeyan and 500 argus pheasants
- 1,000 woodpeckers
- 1,450 little auks and great crested grebes
- 14,000 quail, grouse and partridge
- 4,000 snipes and plovers
- 7,000 starlings, jays and magpies
- 12,000 hummingbirds
- 5,000 tanagers
- 6,000 blue creepers
- 1,500 other creepers
- Several hundred each of hawks, owls, gulls, terns, ducks, ibises, finches, orioles, larks, toucans, birds of paradise.
Once sold, the bundles of bird skins were unpacked, washed, dyed, trimmed and fashioned into millinery adornments in a series of fetid outhouses and backyards in the City of London. The feathered ‘novelties’ then passed to a millinery warehouse, and hence to a milliner – whose young, workworn fingers would wrestle them onto a wire and cambric base and stitch them into place, pushing and pulling the needle in and out of the hat’s velvet bandeau.
A large lady approached, pointed her finger at the remains of a greater bird of paradise, and with grim determination, said to her shopping companion: ‘There! I want one o’ them, an’ I’m a’goin’ to have it, too!'”
– W.T. Hornaday, 1912
This is a lost world: one in which the hats, their wearers and the women who made them have vanished. I have plundered the archives to bring this shadowy, feathery world back to life. From the Victorian feather washer imprisoned for stealing two ostrich feathers, to the Irish milliner masquerading as an Italian countess, I unveil the female labour propping up the plumage trade.
Who was buying the murderous millinery? Using old ledger books, diaries and newspaper gossip columns, I uncover the shopping weaknesses of titled ladies, suffragettes and brazen slum girls alike.
