Clodagh Finn: Why Harry Styles’ boa is not a feather in his cap

The recent description of the aftermath of a Harry Styles gig as a “feather boa massacre” brings to mind the fact that our fashion choices have a direct impact on the world we live in

When Harry Styles played Slane Castle here last month, the focus was on the shortage of boas rather than on the surplus waste.

It was a line designed to catch attention: “Harry Styles fans leave Cardiff looking like a ‘feather boa massacre’.”

What an evocative way to describe the scattered plumage cast from the boas of thousands of concert-goers with the same kind of drama left in the wake of a fox’s visit to a henhouse—but with more vivid colours.

The preening and joyful swishing of the fashion accessory favoured by Styles came at a price, though. The local authority in Wales had a big clean-up operation on its hands, although it did say waste feathers would be used to help create green energy.

When Styles played Slane Castle here last month, the focus was on the shortage of boas rather than on the surplus waste, but that was not the case in Edinburgh. Environmental campaigners complained of the “mass moult” littering the Scottish capital after the former One Direction star sold out Murrayfield.

Some have even urged Harry Styles to abandon his trademark boa, arguing that his tour might finish in Italy at the end of this month, but the feathers from his fans’ boas—along with the dye and plastic used in each one—will be around for much longer.

That is assuming fans did not buy boas made of real bird feathers, which are typically made of ostrich and turkey feathers. Peta (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has asked boa-wearers to be more aware of feather origins and to stick to feather-free fashion.

Does all of that sound as if the fun police are working overtime? Perhaps. And there is the issue of scale. The number of feather boas in the world might have increased by tens of thousands in recent months, but it a mere speck when compared with the appetite for feathered fashion in the not-so-distant past.

And yet, the recent “feather boa massacre” is a stark reminder that what we wear has a direct impact on the world we live in.

I’m not for a moment suggesting that boa mania is likely to take hold in the same way that the fashion for feathers did in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but it’s interesting to recall that feathers—and even whole birds—on hats, dresses and shoes were once considered the height of fashion.

So much so that there was a lucrative global trade involving bird hunters, milliners and feather-processing factories that led to the large-scale slaughter of millions of birds. Several species were threatened with extinction.

In Victims of Fashion, Helen Louise Cowie offers this harrowing insight: “From the 1860s until the First World War, women adorned themselves with the plumage of hummingbirds, egrets and other attractive birds, competing with one another to achieve the most elaborate creations.

“One lady, attending a drawing room at Dublin Castle in 1878, wore a dress ‘trimmed with the skins of 300 robins’. Across the Atlantic, a correspondent of the American magazine Forest and Stream spotted ‘on 700 hats 542 birds’ walking down Fifth Avenue in New York in 1886.”

If there was a rush to embrace the fashion, there was also a push to oppose it. In the early years of the 20th century, campaigners—mostly women—tried to change attitudes, and laws, to protect the endangered species.

Suffragettes were active around the same time, fighting for the vote for women, although animal rights’ groups and women’s groups did not always see eye to eye. Prominent activist Emmeline Pankhurst, for example, was a woman partial to a feathered hat and she advised fellow campaigners to dress well (which often meant putting a feather in their own caps).

Emmeline Pankhurst making a speech in 1910. She advised fellow campaigners to dress well (which often meant putting a feather in their own caps). 

Some women were members of both groups, although not bird conservationist Etta Lemon who campaigned for an end to the slaughter of birds for use in fashion. With four other women—Emily Williamson, Eliza Phillips, Catherine Hall and Hannah Poland—she set up the Society for the Protection of Birds in London. It gained its royal charter in 1904.

The new group lobbied women, shopkeepers, politicians and very-feathered royalty to stop wearing the plumage of slaughtered birds. The campaign bore fruit in 1921 when the Plumage Act came into law, banning the import of exotic bird feathers for women’s hats.

Closer to home, there were similar campaigns and a growing awareness of the ugly downside of the feather industry. It devastated the natural world, but there was a human cost too. Feather-processing factories were filthy places where workers spent long hours in awful conditions for a pittance.

In 1909, a letter-writer signed as ‘Bird Lover’ wrote to the Irish Independent urging an end to the “semi-savage fashion of wearing feathers on one’s head”.

The writer continued: “Whatever may be the good purpose underlying the creation of the bird kingdom, one cannot believe it was the bedecking of ladies’ hats… Let her [hat] for this winter be trimmed by neither wing, quill nor bird.”

In Kilkenny, members of the local bird protection society took more firm action. In December 1912, it said it would not admit any women who adorned her headgear with the plumage of birds “when the plucking involves either the death or the cruelty to this, the most beautiful of God’s creatures”.

The recent “feather boa massacre” is a stark reminder that what we wear has a direct impact on the world we live in.

As in the UK, women were prominent in the campaign. One of them, the overlooked Annie Letitia Massy, scientist, marine biologist and ornithologist, deserves much more attention for her work and her role in founding the Irish Society for the Protection of Birds (now Birdwatch Ireland) in 1904.

Born in country Limerick in 1868 to Anne Bennett and her army surgeon husband Hugh Deane Massy, she developed an early interest in the natural world. She would go on to become an international expert on marine molluscs.

Her love of birds, however, was perhaps closest to her heart. It more than doubled the pleasure of life, she once said: “The shearwaters are great company to me at night, and the ravens by day.”

As an 18-year-old, birdwatching in Powerscourt in Wicklow, she discovered the first pairs of redstart birds nesting in Ireland, according to Sharon Slater who provides a welcome profile in her wonderful book 100 Women of Limerick.

She tells us that Massy also helped reboot the Irish Society for the Protection of Birds in 1926 when it was close to collapse, a revival that helped prompt the government to introduce the Wild Birds Protection Act of 1930.

When she died a year later, the Irish Naturalists’ Journal observed that “even the ravens would miss her, for they often paid visits of observation to her well-tended poultry-yard”.

I wonder what she’d make of the recent “feather boa massacre”? She might agree that it’s a million leagues away from “murderous millinery”, but there’s no harm in recalling the destruction a runway fashion for feathers once caused.