[Essay Press; 2024]
In June, I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Sleeping Beauties” exhibit. Highlighting pieces in the Costume Institute’s collection that are too delicate to be worn, the immersive installation focuses on the relationship between nature and fragility in fashion, including sections dedicated to elements of the natural world such as flowers, butterflies, beetles, and birds.
At the center of the room of birds, I found a black and orange jacket lying dormant under a glass case. Designed by Alexander McQueen for his Spring 1995 collection entitled “The Birds,” this jacket embodies both fortitude and fragility. An inky black swarm of swallows envelops the shoulders while the swallows dive into the orange, down the chest, and across the torso. The black shoulders, in contrast to the orange lapel, slope upwards dramatically as if wings could sprout from the seams at any moment.
On the runway, the model was shirtless underneath, holding the jacket closed with her forearm, stretched across her stomach like a wounded wing. In Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer’s Journal, a book that oscillates between theoretical essays and memoir, Sarah Rose Nordgren uses McQueen’s designs as an example of the fine line between objectification and empowerment in women’s fashion. In “The Birds,” the models were styled to resemble roadkill, signified by motifs like tire-print tracks and hair teased to resemble bird’s nests. Looking at this jacket, however, I am not reminded of the run-over squirrel but of the vulture who sweeps down to dine roadside. While some critics have called McQueen’s work unnecessarily violent or misogynistic, Nordgren sees the clothes as “a record and reclamation” of violence that has already happened, “as well as a shield against future mistreatment.”
Just beyond McQueen’s jacket, a dozen feathered millinery sit on pedestals, each bird-hat its own macabre reminder of the trend that took over women’s fashion through the turn of the twentieth century. Some of the hats more obviously feature the birds in their design, easily demonstrating the cruelty of this past vogue. One evening bonnet, for example, features feathers that protrude vertically like the spire of a skyscraper. Upon second glance, I realized that an entire bird is nested among the bonnet’s silk and lace, suspended upside down with a broken neck. Turned at an unnatural angle, the bird acts like a bodyguard, holding eye contact with anyone gazing at the wearer. Another hat, made entirely from pheasant, turns the wearer’s head into the bird’s chest, and the head of the pheasant emerges like an antenna from the crown of the wearer’s head. The beak points downwards at the face of the wearer. Once again the neck, turned at a harrowing angle, is a visual reminder of the violence necessary to transform a living creature into an accessory for the opera.
These hats are the portal through which the reader enters Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer’s Journal. Released just a couple of months before “Sleeping Beauties” opened, Feathers begins with an analysis of the bird-hat debate, a gendered and ecological conversation that emerged in response to the use of taxidermied birds in women’s fashion around the turn of the twentieth century. Nordgren uses the dialogue around feathered millinery to explore a robust number of ideas relating to beauty, conformity, and bodily autonomy. Inside a system of restrictive beauty standards, the bird-hat trend was one of the ways women could express their individuality. This came at the price, however, of the five million birds that were killed by the 1890s. In 1886, on the same street as the Met, forty different species of birds could be spotted on the feathered hats of women going about their daily lives.
As Nordgren repeatedly illustrates, the institutional violence experienced by women and birds is connected through both history and metaphor. At the same time that new organizations like the National Audubon Society fought for the protection of birds, women fought for their own liberation. Both the Women’s Suffrage and the Migratory Bird Act were passed in 1918, around the same time when bird-hats became an ecological faux pas.
Part fashion history, gender theory, and memoir, Feathers defies genre through its multi-media format, giving the reader ample ways to engage with the material through a variety of visual aids and narrative approaches. Including advertisements, scientific diagrams, and political cartoons, to name a few, each page is instantly engaging. In a seventy-three-page monochrome book, Nordgren conjures the bloodshed of dozens of species of birds as well as the beauty of the garments made from their feathers.
Styled like an old women’s magazine, Feathers interrogates the very material that it mimics. In “The Ghosts of Birds,” Nordgren explains how magazines like Harper’s Bazaar constructed opinions around the bird-hat debate. For example, Mary Thatcher’s article “The Slaughter of the Innocents,” printed by Harper’s Bazaar in 1875, was the first published essay to criticize bird-hats. While Thatcher condemns women for their cruelty in wearing birds, she also suggests that such “moral lapses are more likely to be ignored if you’re the right kind of beautiful while wearing them.” Positioned in an impossible double standard, women are only excused from cruelty if their beauty outshines their violence.
Here, Nordgren touches on a very important question: How can women meet the impossible expectations laid out for them, especially when those expectations conflict with one another? In “Mothers and Monsters,” Nordgren explores this paradox through the relationship between womanhood and monstrosity. Mothers are nurturing, passive creatures while monsters are unpredictable hybrid beasts. These roles are socially assigned based on a woman’s virtues, and if she deviates even slightly from her good nature, she is immediately submerged in the camp of monstrosity.
During the nineteenth century, natural beauty became the height of fashion, even though women relied on unnatural tactics like corsetry to achieve a more “natural” look. Bird-hats gained popularity because they positioned the wearer as part of the natural world, but, as women toted corpses on their heads, they also aligned women with violence and monstrosity. Reinforcing their own subjugation, women “enabled the slaughter and literal picking-apart of the birds they resembled in order to gain symbolic control over their own fates.” Fashion and dieting were two ways in which women could express bodily autonomy, but systemic oppression dictated what choices were respectable. A woman could choose not to diet, but her defiance could become a testament to her undisciplined and overbearing character. Similar standards were enforced for fashion. Individual women could choose not to wear bird-hats, but their acceptance in society might waver if they failed to conform to acceptable standards of beauty. While Nordgren emphasizes bird-hats as a reaction to the patriarchy, this exploration stops on the streets of Fifth Avenue, leaving us wondering about the women living in Brooklyn, or even Baton Rouge. Like many trends in fashion, controlling women by way of their physical appearance, rather than more institutionalized systems of oppression, becomes an issue primarily affecting the white upper-class.
Each of Nordgren’s essays contributes a new cultural perspective about birds and women, but it is the first-person narrator who turns the bird-hat debate into a trans-temporal device of storytelling. Implied to be Nordgren’s younger self, the narrator–who I will refer to as Sarah–grows up throughout the journal from a pre-teen ballerina into a woman and mother, all written in the present tense. Distinguished by italics, Sarah’s voice is formatted in short snippets, sometimes not even finishing a sentence before she jumps across the page. Nordgren’s choice to include Sarah offers the reader a new understanding of how the bird-hat debate, and similar paradoxical issues, influenced twenty-first-century womanhood.
We meet Sarah at the age of twelve in “Bonnets in Revenge.” After observing the food choices of her smaller, petite friends, Sarah decides to stop eating meat as a way to restrict her diet, hoping her more bird-like eating habits will render her body more acceptable. Her relationship with food and body image spirals throughout Feathers as she wrestles with how to perform femininity. While Sarah’s narration can feel trite at times, Nordgren’s vast theoretical voice guides Sarah into meaning as we jump across space and time.
This is most clearly demonstrated in “Anatomy of a Swan,” where two perspectives of text surround anatomical diagrams of swans. First is an analysis of Swan Lake, from the first iteration of the ballet to the 2010 film Black Swan. On the other side, Sarah recounts her competitive relationship with her college roommate, Ruby, a dynamic that mirrors Swan Lake’s Odette and Odile. Sarah and Ruby are both dancers at a liberal arts college with eating disorders and unattractive boyfriends. Their instinct to hate each other seems to pre-date either’s matriculation as if it is an inherent result of their similarities. Odette and Odile, Nordgren points out, were originally performed by one ballerina, and Odile was not a swan at all. It was easier, however, for audiences to distinguish Odette and Odile if their differences were further contrasted by their similarities, so Odile was transformed into the Black Swan. Side by side, the swans are plucked apart, feather by feather, leaving the same lithe body underneath: the White Swan and the Black Swan, Sarah and Ruby, the mother and the monster.
Sarah’s struggle to claim bodily autonomy is her bird-hat. When she decides to defy standards of acceptability, she risks being turned into a social pariah. In “Bellbirds on the Catwalk,” the final essay, the page is split into two columns. On the right, Nordgren talks about how beauty standards are often institutions of attraction rather than survival. “Sexual selection,” in contrast with natural selection, has led many birds to evolve to attract mates despite the impracticalities of beauty. In the left column, Sarah elects to shave her head. After decades of choices in favor of sexual selection, Sarah instead chooses comfort and self-expression. In the aftermath of two failed marriages, her new partner helps to free her of her feathers with his electric razor. That night, Sarah attends a concert where a woman she doesn’t know stops her to tell her how beautiful she is, and she believes it. In the past, as chronicled in the essays about her middle school friends and later her college roommate, Sarah has often viewed other women as competition. By honoring her desires rather than the male gaze, Sarah redefines her relationship with her body and the women around her.
In the final pages, Nordgren and Sarah’s columns blur together, melding together the personal and didactic. They quote the same Oliver Bendorf poem about Bellbirds, a species whose feather patterns appear female but whose call sounds male. Bellbirds are one example of how animals exist outside of the mythology impressed upon them by humans. While bird-hats were once a visual signifier of women’s proximity to nature, this construct collapsed the real existence of both birds and women. As Nordgren and Sarah’s voices veer into one another, reuniting the personal and theoretical, Nordgren and Sarah’s gender expression becomes a playful tool for identity rather than an oppressive system of control.
Feathers opens up a chasm of contradictions, and it doesn’t aim to solve them. Women who wore bird-hats were both victims of the patriarchy and assailants in the birds’ destruction. People’s interactions with nature are both oppressive and aspirational. Contemporary women have gained more bodily autonomy, but the decisions they make about their bodies are still scrutinized. Instead of concluding these vast explorations, Nordgren asks the reader to sit in the discomfort of ambiguity.
While the environmental and feminist movements have made major strides in the past century, this progress arrived too late for both the birds of bird-hats and the women who were complicit in their demise. Through Nordgren’s writing, the birds of the feathered hats come back to life. In the worn hatboxes of ancestors, the shelves of vintage shops, and the glass cases at the Met, they are reawakened to their stuffed and sewn condition. Most taxidermy only lasts twenty to fifty years, and these birds have long outlived both their owners and protectors. At the Met, white gloves move them from one dark room to another; the same species that killed off their kin preserves their sacrifice. They wonder what happened to the nest of tresses where they once sat as they strolled down Fifth Avenue. With their beautiful feathers, glass eyes, and twisted necks, the birds beckon us, asking to be placed on our heads. Many of their songs have been lost to the world, but as their feathers brush our ears, can we take a moment to listen to their silence instead?
Hunter Julo is a writer from Kansas City. They graduated from Wesleyan University in 2022 with a BA in Creative Writing and currently live in Brooklyn. You can read their creative work here or follow them on Instagram @hunterjulo.
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