Walking into Edmonton's new Fashioning Feathers exhibit feels like entering a holocaust museum for birds. It's shocking, informative and thought provoking and forces you to re-examine your beliefs about fashion.
One of its goals is to atone for the last century's crimes against bird-kind, says Liz Gomez, an instructor at Athabasca University. Birds and their feathers were the height of fashion early in the 1900s, she notes, which drove many species to extinction as hunters slaughtered them by the millions.
Gomez is one of the curators of the Fashioning Feathers exhibit that opened at the University of Alberta's Fine Arts Building Gallery this week. The exhibit, co-organized by Merle Patchett, examines the history of bird feathers in the millinery (women's hats) industry.
We might not imagine 19th-century Prairie women going to churches with parrots in their hats, Gomez says, but that was how common these hats were back then. "That's why these birds were almost shot into extinction."
The plume boom
Patchett, a cultural geographer with a rich Scottish accent, says she got the idea for the exhibit through her study of the history of taxidermy. "At one point in history, they were also stuffing birds to have on hats."
She teamed up with Gomez, who was studying the history of empire, to organize the show. The show is part of a larger conference at the university this weekend on crafts and material culture. The show itself features many examples of feathered hats from the university's archives, some of which were made in Canada. Other displays show bird wings and heads from throughout the millinery process, their feathers still resplendent with red, green and gold. Videos and boards recount the histories of these birds in life, as the haunting "wah, wah, wah" of a bird-of-paradise echoes throughout the gallery.
Feathered hats have been a part of European fashion for centuries, Patchett says, but really took off in the late 1700s with the Duchess of Devonshire's feathery wigs. Some hats were particularly elaborate, featuring whole birds with spring-loaded wings.
From around 1890 to 1914, a newly wealthy middle class and the discovery of the huge, brilliant plumes of New Guinea's birds-of-paradise caused an explosion in demand for feathered hats. Hundreds of millions of exotic birds were killed, the exhibit notes, with up to 80,000 birds-of-paradise skins exported per year to Europe and America at the boom's height. That species, as well as the North American egret, was driven to near extinction as a result.
Curiously, Patchett says, many of these brilliant birds were later dyed black. She and Gomez aren't sure why, but suspect it may have been for stylistic reasons — black goes with everything, after all. Many bird hats were also worn during mourning.
The boom reached Alberta as well, Gomez notes. Almost every town had a hat store, and many had hat classes where women would make their own feathered caps. "They turn up in the Eaton's department store catalogue," she notes. "Someone living in small-town Alberta in 1913 could purchase a bird of paradise."
The boom also employed some 83,000 North Americans, Patchett notes, many of them young women. Those women often got tuberculosis from working in the dusty sweatshops used to prepare ostrich feathers.
Bust and resurgence
This mass slaughter of birds prompted the creation of today's Audubon societies, Patchett says, and contributed to international bans on trades in endangered species.
While the First World War certainly torpedoed enthusiasm for expensive hats, Patchett says, it was actually a haircut that sunk them. Shorter hairstyles like the bob emerged in the 1920s, and those weren't compatible with huge, feathery hats.
But feathered hats haven't gone away, she continues, and are enjoying a surge in popularity thanks to the recent British royal wedding. Habitat destruction also continues to threaten many bird species. Today's feather-fashioners claim their plumes are ethically harvested, but so did milliners toward the end of the boom. "Is this biography of a lie being repeated?"
The free show runs until June 11. See fashioningfeathers.com for details.
