Feathers On Hats: The Murderous Trend that Launched the Conservation Movement

So far, most of the pieces that I’ve written for Bird History have been stand-alone stories. But for the next several months, my bi-weekly pieces will tell the story of how the United States started protecting its birds. This meandering, fifty-year saga, involving feather hunting, ladies’ clubs, murder, international treaties, and bird lovers from all segments of society, is too big to fit in just one post. Each of these topics will make for what I hope is an interesting read in its own right, but they’re also an important part of a bigger story. They explain why we protect birds in America, and why we protect them in this particular way.

It all started with ladies’ hats.

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On a February afternoon in 1886, the ornithologist Frank Chapman went looking for birds in Manhattan. But rather than venturing into Central Park, Chapman headed for New York’s uptown shopping districts. He spotted a few of the common birds you might expect to see on a wintry afternoon in Manhattan — five Blue Jays, two Red-bellied Woodpeckers, one White-throated Sparrow. But he also saw an incredible array of birds that had strayed far from their normal winter range. Chapman found a Blackburnian Warbler with its flaming orange throat, and three brilliant Scarlet Tanagers. He counted nine Baltimore Orioles, twenty-three Cedar Waxwings, sixteen quail, two meadowlarks, and a single teacup-sized Saw-whet Owl. And every one of these lifeless birds was mounted on a woman’s hat.

Of the roughly seven hundred hats that passed Chapman by, five hundred forty-two bore feathers, wings, or entire birds. Most of the rest were worn by “ladies in mourning or elderly ladies.” When he reported the results of his now-famous hat-watching expedition to the magazine Forest and Stream, Chapman apologized that he could only identify such a small number of birds, since “mutilation rendered identification impossible.”¹

At the end of the 19th century, feathered hats were not just in style, they were unavoidable. As one critic remarked in 1876, “For many of the hats now worn, the only direction need be – cover them with feathers till neither the material nor the shape are recognizable,” adding a verse for emphasis:

Feather, feather, feather, feather,
Worn in every sort of weather;
It doesn’t really matter whether
This and that look well together
If it only be a feather.²

Wearing feathers in hats, of course, was nothing new. People have always taken the bright plumes grown by birds to attract mates and appropriated them to similar purposes. But like all fashions, feathers migrated in and out of style. The last time feathers were this big, Marie Antoinette started a craze for elaborately piled hairpieces featuring flowers, plumes, and even stuffed birds, until the same revolution that separated her head from her shoulders spread republican sensibilities that made feathers passé for the next fifty years.

It took the boom in prosperity that followed America’s Civil War to bring back these elite styles and place them within middle-class reach. The feathered accents that were once limited to military uniforms and aristocratic attire became firmly mainstream.

But to hatmakers, also known as milliners, feathers were just one more embellishment to adorn the accessory that had become an indispensable component of every self-respecting woman’s wardrobe. Gilded Age hats had long ago left behind any practical purpose they once occupied, becoming more like an elaborate centerpiece blocking the view of diners on either end of a banquet table. In fact, hats had grown so large that many cities passed ordinances banning hats large enough to obstruct views from being worn in theaters.³ Notwithstanding these laws, women still needed one hat for going to the opera, one hat for going to church, and another hat to wear in mourning, each of which had to be appropriate for the season of the year and a proper fit for their outfit, figure, complexion, and station in life.

Hats came in dozens of styles, with new ones constantly in development. Women could buy a pompadour, a bebe, an Alpine hat, a toque, a turban, sailor, or a bonnet. Hats could be made of straw, velvet, silk, or felt of every color, sewn with plaits and puffs, and shaped around a wire or willow frame. These forms sometimes seemed to be nothing less than vehicles for adornment, loaded as they were with artificial flowers, lace, chiffon, satin, buckles, imitation jewels, glass ornaments, braids made from straw and horsehair, and trinket “novelties.”

Feathers only added to this nearly infinite variety. Not only did they naturally come in every imaginable color and size, but they could be dyed and trimmed and joined to meet the whims of fashion. Wings were pinned on singly, or arranged in a fan. Owl heads were perched “with bodies and without.”⁴ A spray of small warblers or hummingbirds might decorate a hat, while large bird bodies were stuffed and postured or disassembled and rearranged into fantastical new beasts.

And milliners arranged these birds on hats with no respect for taxonomic consistency. One disgusted ornithologist grumbled that “The assemblage of diverse and incongruous forms sometimes met with on the same hat is often striking in the extreme; birds from the opposite ends of the earth, and of the ornithological scale of classification, being brought into most inharmonious combination, viewed even from the artistic stand-point.”⁵

New York, America’s fashion capital, dominated the design, manufacture, and sale of women’s hats. But just like New Yorkers sought to emulate the latest fashions developed by the millinery houses of London and Paris, the hat makers and hat dealers in Chicago, New Orleans, San Francisco, and smaller points in between did their best to access New York’s latest accessories. And thanks to catalogues like Sears Roebuck, & Co., women in Milwaukee and Omaha could also wear feathers from Brazil’s parrots or Papua New Guinea’s birds of paradise.⁶

Whichever feathers happened to be in fashion changed year to year and season to season. A 1925 guide to millinery described how “Plumes and tips closely curled may be used one year; the next season there may be a demand for willow plumes, and the following year, one for pompons or ostrich band trimming… Small birds are in vogue from time to time. Again, only wings, breasts, or quills are popular.” And each season, a generous assortment of publications like Harper’s Bazaar and Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine reliably informed the public which kinds of feathers were in and which were out.⁷

In 1876, for example, the Millinery Trade Review advised its readers that “we are nothing if not flowery this summer, which is all very well, as it is best to save feathers for winter hats. Not, however, meaning to say that feathers have disappeared altogether from summer chapeaux, for they are often seen in clusters of two or three curling tips, or one longer demiplume – but the abundance of wings, birds, and feather ruches have been abandoned, and it is to be hoped that the slaughter of the innocent birds is stayed for the present.”⁸

And in 1889, the same publication predicted that “Fancy feathers will also play a conspicuous part in the millinery of the autumn and winter… and much use will be made of aigrette, plumes of the wings and tails of the different birds-of-paradise and herons’ plumes… Small birds appear in clusters and dot the brims of large hats, and wings cover the crowns of bonnets.”⁹

While some species were targeted more intensively for the plume trade, there was really no limit to the use of birds for fashion. If it had feathers, people used it. The forty species Frank Chapman spotted on hats in New York represented just a fraction of the American birds used in millinery and the even greater variety of birds sourced from abroad.

The insatiable demand for novel feathers was siphoning away the brightest birds, as one publication put it, “from Borneo to Brazil,” and brought them to auction houses in London, Paris, and New York. The “radiant orange tanagers, blue tanagers of delicious tint, and the dark but rich-toned port wine and black tanagers,” all coming from the Amazon, were favorites among the smaller birds. “Even the unsavory vulture is not allowed to escape,” wrote one reporter, who described how vulture feathers were dyed and used as low-price ‘trimmings.’¹⁰

Of all feathers found in the showroom, the aigrettes — wispy white plumes worn by herons and egrets during the breeding season — were the finest, and the most expensive. As the Savannah Morning News expressed in 1904, “an aigrette, that most fashionable of all feather ornaments this season, tells in no uncertain language to those who understand that it is much more than worth its weight in gold.” This was no exaggeration — in 1900, gold sold for $20 per ounce, while the wholesale price of unprocessed aigrettes ranged from $23 to $30 per ounce.¹¹

Yet the most incredible aspect of a feather showroom wasn’t the variety, but the quantity of birds on display. While the tanagers were sold by the hundreds, “the humming-birds come in thousands and tens of thousands, of so many different hues that the shaking up and turning over of a case of ‘various humming’ is as full of surprises as that ancient toy the kaleidoscope.” One ornithological publication estimated that a single London sale contained more birds than all of the ornithological collections of the United States combined.¹²

A great deal of America’s human capital was dedicated to turning these feathers into hats. As with other garment trades, milliners were mostly women, mostly young, and mostly immigrants or the children of immigrants. The 1900 census listed 82,936 women employed as milliners, representing one out of every one thousand Americans, largely concentrated in New York City’s Lower East Side.

The milliners who specialized in processing feathers were called plumassiers, and they accounted for maybe five or ten percent of the millinery workforce. These young women worked in what we would today call sweatshops, laboring long hours in cramped tenement workshops to prepare feathers that had been subcontracted out by retailers and wholesalers for starvation wages. Two thirds of women and girls in the feather business earned less than seven dollars a week.¹³

Worse than the low pay was the seasonal and unpredictable nature of the work. Women might spend a few months working fourteen hour days to stock a retailer with its fall fashions, only to be out of work for the next six months. Their health also suffered from the unsanitary working conditions. A 1913 investigation into millinery sweatshops revealed how “the dust and the small particles which flew off from the feathers when they were sewing them hurt their throats and ‘often gave girls consumption.”¹⁴

While the feathers worn in hats were meant to evoke the purity and freedom of birds found far from the city, the bleaching, dying, shaping, trimming, and joining of feathers to finalize them for the market left them a highly artificial product. The brightly-colored feathers from tropical climes themselves needed no embellishment. But creative milliners discovered that “With the assistance of a little dye,” white gulls’ feathers could easily be “transformed into that of the gaily colored tropical birds.”¹⁵

Some workers would “shape” feathers, or reassemble individual feathers into an imitation wing, sometimes held together by threading a wire through the quill of each feather so it could be bent in any direction. Others would curl the feathers by holding them over steam coming from a boiling-hot kettle, or pulling barbs one by one against a knife blade. Still others would spend hour after hour willowing ostrich feathers, which meant lengthening each tiny feather fiber by tying together several more fibers of the same kind. This tedious, meticulous process created a beautiful sweeping effect, but preparing a single plume required tying as many as 8,600 knots, which might take a woman working with two children a day and a third to complete.¹⁶

But there was one more kind of labor that was necessary for placing feathers on women’s hats. The first link in the supply chain, and the one most prominent in the popular imagination, was the work of slaughtering millions of birds. Fashion demanded that hats must have feathers whatever the price, and so an army of both casual and professional hunters marched to war. In my next post, I’m going to look at how this immense quantity of feathers was harvested from the wild, and the birds that suffered as a result.

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1. Chapman, Frank. “Birds and Bonnets.” Forest and Stream. United States: Forest and Stream Publishing Company, February 25, 1886. ↩︎
2. “The Trade in Berlin.” The Millinery Trade Review, Vol. 1, no. 11. November, 1876. ↩︎
3. Franklin, H. (2018). The Supreme Law for the Hat is to Be Ravishing: The Theatre Hat Problem in America, 1875-1915 [Master’s thesis, Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York]. FIT Institutional Repository. https://institutionalrepository.fitnyc.edu/item/278 ↩︎
4. “Fashions for November, 1880: New Millinery.” The Delineator. United Kingdom: Butterick Publishing Company, Vol. 16, No. 5. November, 1880. ↩︎
5. “Destruction of Birds for Millinery Purposes.” Science 7, no. 160 (1886): 196–97. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1760349. ↩︎
6. Patchett, Merle. “Fashioning Feathers: Dead Birds, Millinery Crafts and the Plumage Trade.” 2011. https://fashioningfeathers.info/birds-of-paradise/ ↩︎
7. Patty, Virginia C.. Hats and how to Make Them. United States: Rand McNally, 1925; Graham, Frank., Buchheister, Carl W.. The Audubon Ark: A History of the National Audubon Society. United States: Knopf, 1990. ↩︎
8. “New York Millinery.” The Millinery Trade Review, Vol. 1, no. 4. April, 1876. ↩︎
9. Millinery Trade Review. Vol 14, No. 8. New York. August, 1889. ↩︎
10. “Fashion and Feathers.” The Millinery Trade Review, Vol. 1, no. 3. March, 1876. ↩︎
11. “The Romance of the Aigrette.” The Savannah morning news. (Savannah, Ga.), 24 Jan. 1904. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn89053684/1904-01-24/ed-1/seq-21/> ↩︎
12. “Fashion and Feathers.” The Millinery Trade Review, Vol. 1, no. 3. March, 1876; Graham, Frank., Buchheister, Carl W.. The Audubon Ark: A History of the National Audubon Society. United States: Knopf, 1990. ↩︎
13. Van Kleeck, Mary. Artificial Flower Makers. United States: Survey associates, Incorporated, 1913. ↩︎
14. Ibid. ↩︎
15. Sharp, Arthur G.. The Hat That Killed a Billion Birds: The Decimation of World Avian Populations for Women’s Fashion. United States: McFarland, Incorporated, Publishers, 2024. ↩︎
16. Van Kleeck, Mary. A Seasonal Industry: A Study of the Millinery Trade in New York. United States: Russell Sage Foundation, 1917. ↩︎