Birds’ plumage has featured in the dress of certain cultures for millennia, becoming significant in western society by the 1400s, when luxury feathered trimmings demonstrated wealth and courtly status. In Tudor Britain jewels and ostrich feathers formed fashionable hat decorations, single ostrich feathers or plumes (feather clusters) remaining in vogue for generations. During the 17th and 18th centuries ostrich, osprey, heron, peacock and even vulture feathers produced an ostentatious flourish in vast hats or towering wigs. By the late 1700s ostrich plumes were being adopted by the emerging middle classes, soaring demand causing the near extinction of wild ostriches. During the 1820s and early 1830s swansdown ‘tippets’ (boas) and wide-brimmed hats heaped with ostrich or marabout stork feathers were the rage. Ostrich plume headdresses were also a requisite of official court dress 1700s–1900s.

As material wealth increased for the rising Victorian middle classes, the pace of fashion accelerated and desire for display and novelty intensified. Colonial expansion and exploration of distant lands introduced previously unknown bird species to Europe, fuelling fashionable demand for feathers, wings and entire birds to decorate hats and accessories. To familiar native British birds such as grebes, gulls, herons, finches, jays and pheasants were now added the vibrant plumage and skins of exotic and rare species like the hummingbird, lyrebird and bird of paradise. Early Victorian taste favoured feathers and plumes for hair ornaments and bonnet trimmings, but from the late 1850s onwards hats re-entered fashion, offering a firmer base for decoration, from the modest feathered edging of neat 1860s ‘pork pie’ hats to the bold exhibition of birds mounted on springs (for ‘natural’ movement) by the late 1870s.

By the late 19th century the vogue for plumage extended well beyond millinery, with feathers and bird parts being incorporated into earrings and corsage ornaments, muffs now made entirely of feathers or stuffed with eiderdown. Stick fans were edged with marabout or formed of various natural or dyed feathers, including cock, pheasant and pigeon, while screen-type fans might be adorned with exquisite iridescent hummingbirds. The most gruesome trends occurred from the mid 1880s when headwear grew tall, providing a large display area for not only entire birds but an unnatural array of animal and organic matter.

The craze for feathered accessories persisted throughout the Edwardian era, supported by the popular pastimes of hunting, shooting and taxidermy. Birds were subjected to cruelty and mass slaughter on an unimaginable scale, the period from c.1860–1921 now recognised as the most destructive for the global bird population. Conservationist protests in some enlightened quarters inspired various preservation acts and the Society for the Protection of Birds was formed in 1891, becoming the RSPB following its royal charter in 1904. Yet the international plumage trade continued to prosper. When the 1908 Importation of Plumage (Prohibition) Bill was finally passed in 1922, feathered hats were no longer in vogue. Over centuries the whims of fashion had caused the extermination of many millions of birds worldwide.{