Welcome to the Fashion Bestiary
“Since the very beginning of life on earth, and since the emergence of humankind, there have existed particularly close and intimate relationships between humans and fur-bearing animals. Unlike cattle, pigs, goats, or sheep, the animals that provided fur were not only a source of meat but also supplied skins used to clothe the human body. In this way, fur-bearing species gained a double value. However, the animals did not surrender their flesh and pelts willingly. Depending on their size and strength, there arose, especially in prehistoric times, bitter struggles between humans and animals, until humankind succeeded, through the invention of traps and improved weapons, in making the hunting of fur-bearing animals ever less dangerous.”
— Walter Krausse, “Zur Einführung,” Amtlicher Katalog der Internationalen Pelzfach-Ausstellung und Internationalen Jagd-Ausstellung Leipzig [Introduction, Official Catalogue of the International Fur Trade Exhibition and International Hunting Exhibition] (1930)
It might seem that the topic of fashion and animals would be a central concern within Human–Animal Studies, Fashion Studies, and Science and Technology Studies, and that it would be discussed in philosophy and economics classrooms where morality and consumerism converge. Fashion is also deeply gendered, and its study intersects with gender theory, revealing how debates around animal use in dress have often targeted women in particular. Fashion, gender, animals, and ethics are unevenly entangled in public perception, and this intersection offers rich potential for studying the material, cultural, and historical forces that have shaped wealth, expansion, and brutality throughout human history.
Yet despite this promise, the topic remains largely unexplored, often framed through contemporary moral and ethical judgments that render it inherently problematic. With the exception of a few Freudian interpretations which are, no pun intended, not particularly satisfying. For the longest time, animals in fashion were so self-evident and omnipresent that no one cared to write about them; now they have become so fraught, with leather, fur, and feathers long forgotten, that few seem willing to touch the subject at all.
This project seeks to challenge that attitude and to uncover the assumptions that have made the relationship between fashion and animals so difficult to confront. Its purpose is not to judge or condemn, nor to romanticize or idealize, let alone to prescribe any fashion. Rather, alongside tracing the cultural history of dress, it seeks to understand why we might find it almost repulsive and yet, at the same time, strangely compelling. For the animal in fashion has always been both attractive and repulsive, a site of fascination and contradiction.
Building on this, Fashion Bestiary situates that tension within a broader intellectual history. It traces a genealogy of our morals, to speak with Nietzsche, and an archaeology of distinction in Bourdieu’s sense. It recognizes that our gaze is socially constructed, shaped by history, class, and cultural conditioning, which determine not only what we see but how we are taught to see. Because, strangely enough, we so readily celebrate these same objects behind glass, arranged in the safety of the museum diorama, why do they disturb us when worn on the woman’s body?
Infanta Maria Francisca of Portugal (1800–1834), a Portuguese princess and Spanish princess, is depicted wearing a bird of paradise mounted whole on her hat. The inclusion of the exotic specimen reflects early nineteenth-century colonial trade and aristocratic display practices. The South American taxidermy birds under glass beside her further illustrate the gendered division of representation: women adorned themselves with animal bodies, while men hunted, classified, and exhibited them as objects of science and possession
By asking what vestimentary animals once signified to those who wore them, one must also consider what they mean for us today, and why it remains so challenging to move beyond the persistent tensions between aesthetic desire and ethical concern for animal welfare. Perhaps the problem lies deeper, in the way cultural expectations have long confined women and fashion to the surface, denying them the depth of meaning and agency they have always possessed. This is, undeniably so, also true of animals. To confront the history of such fashions is, in a certain sense, to pay tribute to the animals whose lives were taken for them, rather than to belittle their sacrifice. Welcome to the Fashion Bestiary. Welcome to Vestimentary Animals.
