Fashion Bestiary emerged from my master’s thesis, “Vestimentäre Tiere – Tierartefakte in der Mode” (Vestimentary Animals – Animal Artifacts in Fashion), completed in 2024.
The word vestimentary comes from Roland Barthes’s The Fashion System and describes everything that is made to be worn. Thus, the vestimentary animal is the worn animal, sometimes preserved in almost its full form, sometimes transformed beyond recognition, yet always present in what we call fashion.
This project examines how fashion and animals have been connected throughout history, tracing how ideas of beauty, belief, and violence are woven into what we wear. From the fur-wrapped Neanderthal to the biblical garments of Adam and Eve, from Renaissance flea-furs to feathered hats, fox stoles, and stuffed birds of the nineteenth century, traces of the animal have always remained in clothing.
In modern times, designers such as Karl Lagerfeld, Alexander McQueen, and Daniel Roseberry have reimagined this ancient connection. Their work turns elegance into anatomy and luxury into reflection, reminding us that the vestimentary animal still lives beneath the surface of style. The activism and fashion movements of the past often distorted this bond; they influenced each other by focusing solely on the animal as material, which gradually disappeared from view. Today, activism aims to bring the animal behind the material back into consciousness, making visible what once, ironically, lay hidden in plain sight.
Long before Darwin described the kinship between species, fashion had already performed it. To dress was to imitate, to borrow, to blur, and at the same time to reinforce, the line between human and non-human animal. This was never a neutral act. Fashion has always been shaped by shifting ideas of morality, religion, class, and access, by power and discourse, as Foucault would say.
The demand for fur, one of the oldest trades, helped map the modern world, driving commerce and travel across Siberia and Canada in pursuit of pelts that defined empires and seasons alike. The appetite for feathers and birds, on the other hand, pushed empires to the outer reaches of the globe, claiming territories and turning the feather trade into one of the most profitable industries in history. These histories reveal that fashion’s materials are never merely decorative; they are geopolitical. The trade grew so powerful that it drove multiple bird species to the brink of extinction, giving rise to the first environmentalist and conservationist movements.
Fashion Bestiary takes up this history of imitation and power, of desire and destruction, to ask what remains of it today. It gathers fragments from archives, museums, and runways to explore what these vestimentary animals, real or imagined, still have to tell us, inviting readers to look more closely at what we wear, what we inherit, and what still looks back at us from the mirror.