Unsurprisingly, this burgeoning fashion fad led to workshops springing up all around the world where feathers were laboriously prepared for the millinery trade by groups of specialists called ‘Plumassiers’. Literally translated from the French, this word means ‘feather workers’.
An entry in the 1901 edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica describes the term thus: ‘The art of the plumassier embraces the cleaning, bleaching, dying, curling and making up of ostrich and other plumes and feathers’.
And it was reckoned by some that during the ‘working’ lifespan of an single ostrich, which was relieved of its feathers every eight or nine months, around a total of 300 plumes could be ‘harvested’ from the unfortunate creature. Whilst London was recognised as the world auction centre of the plumage trade with companies such as Hale and Sons, Dalton & Young and Figgis & Co to the fore, Paris and New York in turn were the main manufacturing centres. Paris in particular had an extraordinary number of ‘Plumassiers’ and New York’s Lower East Side had many feather ‘sweatshops’. It was not uncommon for tuberculosis, bad skin and even fever to be rife among the workers due to the dust and fluff floating around in these dark, cluttered and low paying establishments – a high price to pay in health terms for the ‘fashion’ of others.
The equally degrading image of little boys climbing up the inside of chimneys in days gone by readily comes to mind. Payment for such demeaning work as ‘Willowing’ was also systematically cut to the bone by unscrupulous employers. (‘Willowing’ can best be described in modern day terms as roughly equating to hair extensions but using feathers as opposed to hair). A poem of the period taken from Sorrowful Rhymes of Working Children in 1911 illustrates the point:
How doth the manufacturer
Improve the ostrich tail?
By willowing the scraggy ends
Until they’re fit for sale
How cheerfully he sits and smiles
Throughout the livelong day
While children knot the tiny flues
And make the plumes that pay.
But desperate people, living seemingly hopeless lives, will do desperate things to survive and make a little money. The New York labour laws sought to combat the use of dirt poor ‘home worker’ children and poverty stricken immigrants within the feather industry (amongst others) but the sheer numbers involved, and a shortage of officers to enforce the law, meant it was, by and large, a losing battle. These often hellish conditions in New York in locations such as Division St. on Manhattan’s Lower East Side are further illustrated by a range of sombre pictures taken by the American sociologist and photographer Lewis W Hine – well known for his work among the poor and under privileged in the lower reaches of American society. It was estimated that there were around 83,000 people involved in the feather industry across America during the early years of the twentieth century; for those who might be interested, a selection of Hine’s images of grim New York feather workshops, illustrating the hellish working conditions, is to be found in the George Eastman House Museum in Rochester, New York State. Having said all this, it has to be very difficult for us today, with our relatively comfortable lives, to truly imagine the reality of life for these struggling feather workers. One is forced to ask oneself whether the upmarket ladies of the day around the world, in their spectacular hats, had the slightest idea – or ever spared a moment’s thought for – all the folk who made their finery possible. In many cases, probably not.
