Tatler

Flight of fancy

Where there’s a quill: why smart society always flocks to bird bijouterie
By Vivienne Becker

Any fashion-conscious socialite of the 1860s would have worn a suite of hummingbird jewels: a necklace hung with gold-framed taxidermy-style bird heads, glinting with iridescent plumage; accompanied by a pair of honeycreeper-head earrings, sculpted in metal and covered with the creature’s skin and feathers; or taking style tips from Empress Eugenie of France, with a stuffed bird worn in the hair; or even with a battery-operated ornament replicating the fast-beating wings that keep the tiny birds hovering in mid-air. Bizarre maybe, but hummingbirds were all the rage, especially after specimens from South America caused a stir at the 1851 Great Exhibition, appealing to the Victorian appetite for novelty and tapping into a Darwin-driven interest in the natural world. However, wearing birds – or parts of them, especially their feathers – was nothing new. A symbol of the soul, of freedom and elevation, moving between heaven and earth, the bird has been a powerful and allusive motif in self-adornment from antiquity to the present day, across cultures and civilisations.

While European bird jewels paid homage to the natural world, in many societies the creatures were connected to the spirit realm, believed to invoke particular powers, the eagle’s bravery, the peacock’s nobility, the dove’s peaceful sweetness. And long-prized their beautiful plumage played a vital role in ritual ornament, whatever the culture. Worn on the head as signs of status and power, they might be the eagle feathers of Native American headdresses or the ostrich feathers fixed to the tiaras of British debutantes presented at court. And it was the white egret feather atop the sarpech – the turban-ornament of Ottoman potentates and Indian princes – that gave its name to the aigrette.