“Feather Muffs of all Colours”

Abstract

The end of the Seven Years’ War (1763) and the acquisition of the fur trade in Canada had an unexpected consequence in British fashion. Despite the increased access to and availability of furs by British furriers, the newspapers noted with disgust that, under the influence of French milliners who had already adapted to their loss of fur supplies, British women of fashion had no taste for furs, only for feathers. The feather muff became the target of the press’s vitriol, an unpatriotic symbol of French sycophantism that was designed to undermine Britain’s victory for which the brave General Wolfe fell.Despite the weighted and charged connotations surrounding the feather muff, its position in eighteenth-century dress and fashion has never before been explored in depth. This article aims to amend that oversight and contextualise the feather muff’s problematic status alongside its material lifecycle and understand the muff as an accessory that could bridge not only the Channel and the globe, but also the disparate worlds of fashion and natural history. Beginning with its notoriously charged appearance in the early 1760s, this article examines the lifecycle of the feather muff in mid eighteenth-century Britain. It first explores the feather muff’s perception in the press as a sartorial French intruder in British fashion. It then establishes how the feather muff was a product of the feather trade, exploring its make and manufacture. Finally, considering the symbolic and emblematic nature of the feather, it places the feather muff within wider narratives of British feather culture, female sociability, and the natural world.