Feathered Foes
Bird Preservation, National Identity, and Fashion in Belle Époque France
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Abstract
When turn-of-the-century conservationists in the United States and Europe began to lambast and promote legislative action against the use of exotic bird feathers in women's fashion, French naturalists stood apart from their Anglo-American colleagues in offering an ecological program that emphasized the needs of the French feather trade. This article explores the particular French cultural investment in fashion not only by feather tradesmen but also by conservationists from the 1890s through the 1920s. This attachment to the importance of women's luxury fashion as a French national patrimony meant that French response to proposed feather bans by the United States and Great Britain included a more sympathetic address to the bourgeois woman consumer and patriotic praise for the skill and taste of the workingwomen of the Parisian feather trade.
Contributor Notes
Patricia Tilburg is chair and James B. Duke professor of history, as well as core faculty in gender & sexuality studies at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina. She is the author of Colette's Republic: Work, Gender, and Popular Culture in France, 1870–1914 (Berghahn, 2009), and Working Girls: Sex, Taste, and Reform in the Parisian Garment Trades, 1880–1919 (Oxford University Press, 2019).