How the provocative history of “murderous millinery” and anti-fur activism forged McQueen’s vision and paved the way for his heir, Daniel Roseberry
Vestimentary Animals: The Inferno Moment
Daniel Roseberry’s Spring/Summer 2023 couture show for Schiaparelli ignited a digital firestorm. When Kylie Jenner arrived wearing a life-sized, hyperrealistic lion’s head, the collective, visceral reaction that flooded social media—”Is it real?”—spoke to a deep-seated cultural anxiety.
The animals, of course, were masterworks of “faux taxidermy.” But the shock they generated was entirely genuine. Roseberry was purposefully engaging with a historically potent and controversial concept: the “vestimentary animal.”
I use the term vestimentary animal to define a garment or accessory that intentionally preserves the original form and ontic shape of the animal. Unlike a fur coat or leather, where the animal is abstracted into a textile, the vestimentary animal remains recognizable as the animal. It is defined by the prominent inclusion of the head, facial expressions, and often the limbs and tail, creating a “reanimated” appearance.
We see this in classic full-head fox stoles from the 1920s. A more recent, striking example comes from cinema: in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the boggart-as-Snape is famously forced to wear a hat topped with a large, stuffed vulture, a key costume piece by Jany Temime that perfectly incapsulates the concept. Roseberry’s “Inferno” collection was a spectacular, modern revival of this idea. To fully understand the power of this gesture, one must trace the turbulent history of the animal body in fashion.
1880–1920: The “Murderous Millinery” Crusade
The late 19th century was an era of paradox. Even as Darwinian theory reshaped humanity’s understanding of species extinction, fashion embraced the “murderous millinery”—a trend of adorning women’s hats not just with feathers, but with entire taxidermied birds.
This practice created a profound cognitive dissonance, resulting in the dead animal being interpreted in two completely contradictory ways:
- The Corpse: On a woman’s hat, the object was a “bird corpse” (Vogelleiche), framed as grotesque, immoral, and a “massacre.”
- The Specimen: In a museum, the same object was a “bird skin” (Vogelbalg), considered scientific, educational, and morally neutral in its “natural history setting.”
The “Plumage Crusade,” the backlash that followed, was arguably less about ornithological preservation and more about social control. The rhetoric was deeply misogynistic. Women who participated in this fashion were depicted as irrational, vain, and savage. Caricatures from the era, like the 1892 Punch illustration “A Bird of Prey,” explicitly depicted the fashionable woman as a monstrous Harpy—a “femme fatale as a threatening predator.”
This moral panic was, however, notably selective. As my research notes, while the feather controversy raged, the wearing of fur—including vestimentary animals like full-fox stoles—remained largely acceptable. Fur was coded as a “domesticated” luxury, while the exotic bird was “wild.” The fox stole was even anthropomorphized as a “furry friend” or “portable pet,” allowing it to escape the censure aimed at the “bird corpse.”
1970s–1990s: The War on Fur and the Abstracted Animal
The moral lens shifted dramatically in the late 20th century. The modern anti-fur movement gained global traction in the 1970s, reaching a pivotal moment with actress Brigitte Bardot’s 1977 campaign against the Canadian whitecoat seal hunt. The graphic imagery of the hunt galvanized public opinion against the fur trade. While effective, this activism also had the devastating and controversial consequence of collapsing the subsistence-based economies of Inuit communities, whose traditional practices were conflated with the commercial slaughter.
This activism paved the way for the 1980s and the founding of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). The campaign crystallized, moving from a single issue to a systemic, celebrity-fueled attack on the entire luxury fur industry.
In a rhetorical echo of the Victorian era, these anti-fur campaigns often deployed misogynistic tropes. PETA’s infamous slogan, “It takes up to 40 dumb animals to make a fur coat. But only one to wear it,” resurrected the Harpy archetype for a new generation, again targeting the female consumer—the “trophy wife”—as the primary agent of cruelty.
The fashion industry’s response was camouflage. To insulate the consumer from guilt, the animal body was abstracted. Fur was sheared, dyed, and processed until it was “no longer recognizable.” The vestimentary animal, with its confrontational face and form, disappeared from the mainstream.
1997–2023: Reclaiming the Beast
The re-emergence of the vestimentary animal in high fashion functions as a “vestimentary text”—a critical commentary on this fraught history. Designers like John Galliano and Alexander McQueen began to resurrect the “Harpy” archetype, not to shame her, but to empower her.
McQueen’s 1997/98 “Eclect Dissect” collection, for instance, sent models down the runway crowned with vulture skulls, a direct reference to the Victorian “Bird of Prey” caricature. Similarly, Galliano’s “Masai” collection for Christian Dior (Fall/Winter 1997) used taxidermy to evoke a powerful, predatory femininity. These designers were deconstructing the myth, forcing the audience to confront the power of the predator, not just the passivity of the victim.
Daniel Roseberry’s 2023 “Inferno” collection is the culmination of this lineage. By engineering faux-taxidermy so hyperrealistic that it triggered a moral panic, he successfully recreated the cognitive dissonance of the 19th century.
Crucially, PETA—the very organization that built its legacy on anti-fur campaigns—defended the collection. Its founder, Ingrid Newkirk, praised the look, calling it a celebration of “the beauty of lions” and “a statement against trophy hunting.” This paradox highlights the evolution of the vestimentary animal: Roseberry’s work is a pastiche. He is not celebrating the “murder”; he is reclaiming the “trophy” and, with it, the complex image of the woman as predator.
Ultimately, the history of the vestimentary animal reveals that these debates are rarely just about zoology. They are, and always have been, reflections of “what ideas the respective society has about women.” McQueen forced us to reckon with the 19th-century Harpy; Roseberry forces us to reckon with the 21st-century Trophy. Both designers prove that fashion’s power lies in its ability to reanimate our deepest cultural anxieties and wear them for all to see.
The Future: Hyperreal Harpies
Roseberry’s collection, by proving the affective power of faux taxidermy, has opened a new trajectory for the vestimentary animal. The future of this trend is no longer tied to the material sourcing of animals, but to the ethics of their representation. As technology and bio-fabrication create increasingly hyperrealistic “surrogates,” the debate will evolve. The moral question will shift from “Is it real?” to “Does it matter if it’s fake?” We are entering an era where fashion can re-introduce the predatory “trophy” without the “murder,” forcing a new confrontation with what we find beautiful, what we find threatening, and why the animal form—real or simulated—remains fashion’s most potent and challenging symbol.
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