At the turn of the last century, the belles of the French belle époque came down with a collective case of avian flou.
‘‘A well-dressed woman nowadays,’’ one journalist noted, ‘‘is as fluffy as a downy bird fresh from the nest.’’ From bonnets to boas and courtesans to countesses, lavish, look-at-me plumes covered everything and everyone posh. Like all status symbols, feathers were pricey — the premium ostrich variety cost as much per pound as diamonds. Hard to fathom? Not really. If the feathered finery swanning down this season’s runways makes one thing clear, it’s that birds are the new/old/new bling. Twisting around gloves and lapels at Ann Demeulemeester, clustered on dress seams and shoe heels at Lanvin, sprayed across T-shirts at Givenchy, plumage has emerged, phoenix-like, from the fin de siècle’s ashes. Notwithstanding the old saw about a bird in the hand, a well-dressed woman nowadays will surely want two in the bush.
With its fluttery sensuousness and fragile grace, the feather might seem like the Platonic ideal of feminine adornment. But in fact, its migration to the Paris runways has only come after an extended exile in Guyville. In the ancient patriarchies of Babylon (2105-1240 B.C.) and Assyria (1200-540 B.C.), plumes mingled with palm fronds in sacred headgear for men. In medieval Europe, feathers featured principally on the metal helmets (heaumes) that men donned for war. Because their heaumes hid their faces, knights needed a means of distinguishing friend from foe in a split second. Feathers also came in handy when the knight tried his luck with the ladies. Based on the era’s protocol for ‘‘courtly’’ love — which served, in a brutish age, to separate the gentleman from the savage — a suitor wore feathers in his damsel’s special colors when he jousted or did battle, albeit with no guarantee of currying favor. As the 14th-century poet Christine de Pizan noted dismissively: ‘‘To wear blue is no proof of love for one’s lady.’’
Henri IV, the first of the Bourbon monarchs and a fabled womanizer, made the feather a linchpin of his own, masculine mystique. At the end of the 16th century, when civil conflict threatened to tear France asunder, this great warrior-king enjoined his fractious subjects to ‘‘rally around my panache blanc.’’ This slogan was a spirited reference to the large white plume Henri wore in his hat, but the king was also reminding his people that his feather, like the medieval knights’, would orient them in the chaos of war. Less loftily, the motto was a coarse anatomical pun, for it posited an equivalency between the king’s big, long panache and his big, long .?.?. appendage. With this double entendre, Henri abandoned the delicacy of courtly love and rebranded the French lord as an unapologetic slayer of both ladies and men.
The white feather remained a flamboyant symbol of machismo through the rest of the ancien régime. Alexandre Dumas’s ‘‘The Three Musketeers’’ (1844), a novel set under Louis XIII, glamorized a trio of swashbucklers, as recognizable by their plume-sprigged hats as by their acts of derring-do. Ditto the hero of Edmond de Rostand’s ‘‘Cyrano de Bergerac’’ (1897). Based on an actual 17th-century nobleman, this dashing cavalier blended the gallantry of the medieval knight (his respectful worship for the unattainable Roxane) with the boundless courage of Henri IV, to whom he pays overt tribute with his own panache blanc (his obscenely outsize nose). At the drama’s end, though mortally wounded in an affair
of honor, Cyrano staunchly maintains that even death cannot beat him: ‘‘I carry forth unblemished and unbent .?.?. my panache!’’
By the time Rostand wrote those words, a century of revolutions had shattered the patriarchal aristocracy under which ‘‘panache’’ had flourished. Though belle époque France was no feminist utopia (it took until 1944 for ladies to win the vote), women had made some important civic gains, provoking rabid reactionaries to label these new unnatural beings hommesses (‘‘man-ettes’’). The fact that the feather emerged as the ultimate female accessory at this very same cultural moment only confirmed such fears. By usurping this emblem of male privilege, power and sexuality, women posed a stark symbolic threat to all of the above.
Meanwhile, the turn-of-the-century painter Toulouse-Lautrec embraced the feathered woman in all her controversial complexity. In his paintings of the dancer Jane Avril, notorious for making the feather boa the centerpiece of her act, Lautrec depicted the stole as an ambiguous sexual totem, its phallic shape transforming Avril into an unsettling, plumed hommesse: male and female, avian and human, castrating harpy and bird of paradise.
Which brings us back to Paris 2010, where the standout collections placed feathers at the service of an edgy, emancipated androgyny. From the biker-babe materials at Ann Demeulemeester (leather, leather and more leather) to the crisp, masculine tailoring at Givenchy (crisp smokings, slim pants and man-tailored blazers à go-go), the looks consistently blurred the boundaries between feminine and masculine, froufrou and fierce. To take this aesthetic to its logical conclusion, the designers simply added feathers. Except, as history has taught us, that process wasn’t at all simple. Panache, you’ve come a long way, baby.
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