Jools Gilson and Nicola Moffat, eds, Textiles, Community and Controversy: The Knitting Map

Abstract

opened up an apparently endless supply, and until 1800 beaver fur was the main trade between America and Europe: the 21 million hats made in Britain for export between 1700 and 1770 consumed 60 million pelts. Fur founded the fortunes of the Hudson’s Bay Company and of John Jacob Astor, the wealthiest American of his era. Less fortunate, however, were Native American hunters, whom traders set against one another, destroying the tribes’ ecology and social systems. The poor beavers, meanwhile, were only saved by the advent of the silk top hat. The beavers’ story is painful, but the central theme of Smith’s book is the shocking impact of hats on the bird world. A felt hat demands ornament, unless you are a Puritan. Most of us are Cavaliers and we like feathers — which, of course, have no real function. Feathers on military headgear might be said to make leaders visible to their men. Not always a good idea: in Sarajevo the helmet of Archduke Ferdinand sported green ostrich feathers, making him an all-too visible target. Ostrich plumes were a favourite hat-trim, and in North Africa ostriches were hunted to near-extinction. Farming in nineteenth-century South Africa saved them — until feathers became pass e in 1912, when the birds were shot or left to fend for themselves. Hummingbirds, parrots and kingfishers were massacred for nineteenthcentury millinery — but the truly terrible slaughter was of the egret. Its delicate, desirable plumes grew in the breeding season, and because the bird had to be killed before the feathers lost their lustre, chicks were left to starve. A conservationist in Florida in the 1890s followed ‘the screams of young birds ... [and saw] heaps of dead Herons... the back of each bird raw and bleeding ... young Herons left to perish from exposure and starvation’. This is one of many horrific descriptions we find in Smith’s book, and if I have any reservations about the book it would be a sense of overload: too many deaths become numbing. Are we justified in exploiting the natural world for survival? Or for personal adornment? These are difficult but important questions, and Smith is convincingly condemnatory in his answers. The chapter on ‘Ladies with Influence’ charts the battle for protective legislation, and he acknowledges the efforts of American and British conservationists — mainly women — who fought to regulate the trade. Protective legislation was fiercely opposed but passed by 1918. It was, however, fashion rather than the law that saved birds: the 1920s cloche had no space for feathers, thus ending (for the moment) the big feathered hat. In this respect, the book underplays the potency of fashion, that ‘something in the air’, an implacable force that caused such carnage and then quite arbitrarily brought it to a halt.