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Feather Fervor: The Ugly Side of the Nineteenth-Century American Fashion Trends

Madison Albano

The Smithsonian’s American History provides an engaging online exhibition about the American Feather Trade in the latter half of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth century. The exhibition site is organized into three different categories: one which focuses on the fashion trends and consumption of feather products, one which focuses on the process of collecting the feathers, and one which discusses the bird conservation movements that developed in response to the feather trade. The most appealing aspect of this exhibition is its ability to incorporate contemporary images of the products created from the commodities – hats adorned with large egret plumes – as well as advertisements,

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Image of the Smithsonian's Virtual Exhibition on The Feather Trade

photographs, and artwork from the nineteenth century that depicts the feather products alongside blocks of text which contextualize the images. Online viewers are able to click on the images and are then redirected to a new page which provides further supplementary context. Although other museums have interesting collections on commodities that one could visit in-person, their virtual exhibitions offered few images of their items and provided little historical context for the pieces. Conversely, the Smithsonian’s virtual exhibition on the feather trade most accurately resembles the organization of an in-person exhibition, as it incorporates a variety of images with texts of historical context. Overall, the exhibition is organized into three different sections, to resemble a museum itself, which would often times have material grouped into sections on different walls within the room of a single exhibition. The exhibition website, however, does appear a bit aesthetically dated (the exhibition was developed in the late 1990s). But although the virtual exhibition’s graphic design leaves something to be desired, its overall presentation of materials is easy to follow and closely resembles the structure of an in-person museum.

 

The exhibition first focuses on the demand in the American Northeast for fashion products made from feathers during the 1800s. Framing the exhibition first around the demand for the product, rather than introducing the exhibition with a description of the feather-hunting industry, enables the exhibition’s creators to contextualize the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American feather trade within a larger, more global context. The exhibition argues that feathers had been a fashion staple amongst the European ruling classes for centuries. This history of high-class fashion influenced the tastes of late nineteenth-century socialites, who first bought fashion items that used internationally sourced feathers. Once the lure for feather products grew, this rise in demand stimulated the advent of bird farming and encouraged bird hunting within the United States. To depict the growing demand for feather products, the exhibit uses advertisements from magazines and newspapers that depict pictures

of women in large, feathered hats. Some other ads solely include images of the feathers, rather than the images of hats or clothing produced from the feathers, as these feathers could be purchased directly. Other ads include images of the birds themselves. By displaying various advertisements, the exhibition makes the argument that middle and upper class people wanted to bring nature into their homes. Although they bought products with feathers in them, the object appealed to them because the clothes embodied the aesthetics of the natural world.

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However, one of the advertisements that the museum exhibits is an image of various wealthy women lounging in large feather hats. The women are seated outdoors, with neatly trimmed ferns on either side of the patio. Inside of the pavilion, small indoor trees sit beside dinner guests. Thus, Americans were interested in placing the natural world inside of the comforts of their domestic lives. The fashion hats represented therefore an overall culture which prized natural opulence, exoticism, and the ability to control or mollify nature.

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Makers: R.R. Donnelley Sons & Company, 1912.

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Although the feather products were themselves luxurious and beautiful, in reality, their cultivation required exploitation and violence. During the early 19th century, the Seminole area of Florida became a refuge for Muskogee peoples who had been forced to flee their homelands in the Southeast US because of war with European settlers. However, as the American demand for European feathers surpassed the supply, American hunters and traders flocked to the Seminole region in order to exploit the bird population. Aside from the American hunters themselves, Indigenous people were forced to hunt birds in order to support themselves economically although they did not hunt birds previously. Excessive hunting caused the

Photograph by H.B. Thrasher, Courtesy National Conservation Training Center Archives/Museum.

populations of egrets and herons to decline rapidly. Likewise, just as consumers of feather products were fascinated with the natural world, so too were hunters. The

exhibition explores the culture around bird-hunting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. American hunters debated over which type of gun was the best for shooting at birds and took photographs celebrating their finest catches. The act of travelling south to hunt for egrets and herons was romanticized, as many paintings and magazines celebrated forays into nature and perceived the act of hunting to embody ideals of adventurism and masculinity. For example, a photograph in the exhibit demonstrates three stoic-looking Federal agents who stand proudly beside a wall of confiscated egret skins. Although the exhibit does a great job documenting the development of feather hunting by showing photographs and paintings which document the feather trade, the exhibit may overall benefit from the inclusion of statistics, as the Smithsonian could show exactly how fast the hunters were able to decimate the bird populations.

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The last portion of the exhibit focuses on the Audubon Magazine, a bird conservation movement that was developed by Boston socialites in the latter half of the 19th century. The exhibition argues that this conservation movement was crucial to the development of the Lacey Act of 1900, which protected many birds by making the hunting of endangered species illegal and issuing permits to other hunters. Overall, the exhibition argues that in the 19th and early 20th century, American interests in a naturalist aesthetic propelled an era of widespread land, animal, and human exploitation in order to satiate Americans’ fashionable taste for feathers. Only as the populations of certain birds such as the Labrador duck and the passenger pigeon were on the brink of extinction did some Americans rally behind conservation movements and establish laws to protect animal populations.

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