ABSTRACT
Bird hats call for ecocritical reevaluation of their peculiar animal-and-human hybridity, their vitality and their visuality. Although composed of the lifeless bodies of birds – and responsible for the near-extinction of species such as egrets – the dead birds and disembodied plumes on hats enhanced the wearer’s allure by reference to the living animals’ vitality. Feathers and bird parts could be seen on all kinds of hats, from close-fitting bonnets and sporty boaters, to outlandishly wide-brimmed ‘picture hats.’ Hats were mandatory attire for upper-middle-class women who wanted to demonstrate fashionable acumen: in 1904, as one journalist observed, “that every woman who would be considered well dressed must have separate and distinct hats for various occasions is as fixed as the laws of the Medes and the Persians”. The very same affinities joining birds and humans in a sort of vital aesthetics of species-perpetuation could be seen as the source for humans’ love of birds as adornment.
