‘Looking lovely with a lemon-coloured egret in her hair’?: Virginia Woolf, global feather fashion, and degrowth aesthetics

Examining the socio-ecological consequences of the craze for feather fashions in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries alongside the waste of contemporary twenty-first-century fast fashion industry, this article considers historical documents on the plumage reform campaign in the context of degrowth frameworks. Through an analysis of Virginia Woolf’s feminist counter-image of imperial hunting practices as the driver of the worst excesses of the global feather trade, it demonstrates how images (literary, photographic, and journalistic) mobilised public debates about feather fashions at a time when plumage reform legislation faltered and stalled. Considering the implications for contemporary environmental politics, it evaluates Woolf’s 1920 essay ‘The Plumage Bill’ and historical debates about reforming the laws governing the importation of bird feathers for use in fashion markets. More broadly, this transhistorical essay considers why degrowth theory has invited critiques of its position on the Global South and details the significance of making visible labour and resistance in the Global South’s for the global fashion industry to become sustainable.