September 25, 2017 Issue

Burkhard Bilger is a superb describer. His wonderful “Feathered Glory,” in this week’s issue, is packed with sensuous imagery. The piece profiles Paris plumassier Eric Charles-Donatien. A plumassier designs feathered clothes and accessories for the fashion industry. Bilger writes, “A plumassier tries to make people as beautiful as birds.” “Feathered Glory” begins brilliantly:

There is such a thing as too much beauty. So the stuffed bird on the counter seemed to be saying. It was a Himalayan monal, Lophophorus impejanus, Liberace of land fowl. Its head was emerald, its neck amber and gold, its back a phosphorescent violet that flared to a sunburst at the tail. A pouf of feathers jutted from its head like a tiny bouquet. Named for Lady Mary Impey, the wife of the Chief Justice of Bengal in the late seventeen-hundreds, it had a stout, ungainly body swaddled in bright plumes as if for an audience with the maharaja. It was a turkey that wanted to be a hummingbird.

Bilger’s writing is like Charles-Donatien’s featherwork – layered and loaded with color and texture: “black fox fur embedded with a glossy ridge of blue-black feathers”; feathers “gilded to look tarnished bronze, then layered like fish scales”; feathers resembling “seashells, armadillo plates, blackened fingernails”: outfits embellished with “a coat of arms, an embroidered badge, a feathered breastplate, tufted sleeves.” He says of Charles-Donatien:

But most of all he created new techniques and textures: he roughed up the feathers to look like fur, or stitched them so close to the backing that they felt as smooth as snakeskin; he mixed them with beadwork in collages, or lacquered and bent them like armor plates.

In the piece, Bilger visits a Paris taxidermy shop (“A family of polar bears stood in one corner, a young giraffe in another; a flight of white pigeons hung from the ceiling, and baby owls peered from the shelves”), the ethnological museum at Quai Branly (“There were mourning masks from Melanesia with cascading beards of cockerel feathers; headdresses from Brazil and the Marquesas Islands, surmounted by feathered fans and diadems; skulls from Papua New Guinea topped by black plumes from a cassowary—a huge, reclusive bird that can gut a person with a stroke of its talons”), and Charles-Donatien’s studio (“A Bach flute concerto played in the background, the notes flitting about in a ghostly flock”). He views a new Vera Wang collection at a private showroom (“With Charles-Donatien’s help, Wang had taken the classic elements of Napoleonic style—peacoats with officer’s stripes, gauzy gowns with Empire waists, fleurs-de-lis and fur stoles, like a French hussar’s—and reimagined them as sexy evening wear”). He goes with Charles-Donatien to meet a lady with a vanload of antique feathers for sale (“The seats inside had been replaced by stacks of wooden crates, plastic bins, and battered drawers, all filled with bundles of yellowed newspaper”). I enjoyed all these excursions immensely.

My favorite passage in “Feathered Glory” is Bilger’s descriptive analysis of Wang’s new collection of outfits:

If you looked closely, you could see patterns in the designs: a heraldic eagle, a pair of rising phoenixes. These were refined, modern designs, yet they had a rude vitality—as if they might peel from the cloth at any moment and take flight.

That phrase “as if they might peel from the cloth at any moment and take flight” is very beautiful. The whole piece is ravishing! I enjoyed it enormously.

Postscript: Rebecca Mead’s “Transformer,” a profile of the Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen, lacks “Feathered Glory” ’s rich texture, but it has a memorable closing scene – the members of Between Music playing their instruments in their water tanks as van Herpen’s models walk around them. It generates one of Mead’s finest sentences: “A mustachioed violinist, in quasi-Edwardian garb, crouched almost fetally under water, his bow rising above the surface, like a shark’s fin, then falling below it.”