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Wearing feathers for, fashion. There aren't any ceremonial reasons for trying to look/be like a bird, the feathers are being worn just to look nice. Whether wearing large plumes or trimmings of down feathers, it's all fashionable, in fiction or in Real Life.
Common forms are feathers on hand fans, feather boas, plumes on hats, trimming a rich lady's nightgown, trimming Pimped Out Dresses, trimming Sexy Santa Dresses, and trimming sexy lingerie. The latter two also make this trope Fetish Fuel.
Common in Costume Porn.
A Sister Trope to Pretty in Mink (in that many times feathers are worn in a similar way as fur).
Finally, any examples of Peacock Girl, where the feathers are worn instead of a character having a peacock tail, would be examples of this.
Compare Gold Makes Everything Shiny, Feather Motif.
Anime & Manga[]
- Naru's wedding dress in Love Hina had the sleeves trimmed with feathers.
- The cover of the second volume of Tenjho Tenge had a lady wearing a white bikini and a feather boa.
- A few feather boas show up in Pokémon, including Jessie's If I Were a Rich Man fantasy.
- A dress in Armored Trooper VOTOMS
- Some of the outfits in Sakura Taisen.
- The Frilly Upgrade additions to the battle dresses in Wedding Peach have feathers. And Salvia wears a feather boa to a yacht party.
- A Feather Bikini paired with a feather Showgirl Skirt is worn by a lady in a carnival style celebration in Science Ninja Team Gatchaman.
- Donquixote Doflamingo in One Piece wears a feather jacket.
- Shindo Sugata during last episodes of Star Driver
- Bleach: Before the time-skip, Yumichika accentuated his right eye with two pairs of feathers (multi-hued in the manga, red and yellow respectively in the anime). After the time-skip he's discarded those feathers for very fluffy feathered earrings and a slight feathering at the ends of his eyelashes on both eyes. His Animal Motif (courtesy of his zanpakutou) is the peacock.
Comics[]
- Recent DC Comics stories set in 1880s Gotham City have shown Mayor Theodore Cobblepot with a feather in his top hat, and his coat seems to be lined with plumage rather than fur; an ironic Call Forward to his descendant's fondness for birds.
Film[]
- Satine's "Pink Diamonds" dress in Moulin Rouge has a Showgirl Skirt of pink feathers.
- Jennifer Lopez's white dress in The Cell.
- Ginger Rogers wore a feathered dress for the "Cheek To Cheek" number in Top Hat. (According to Fred Astaire, the feathers caused problems in filming by flying off everywhere during the dance.)
- The Playboy Bunny outfit Elle was tricked into wearing in Legally Blonde had a feather-trimmed neckline.
- After David's pants are torn in Bringing Up Baby, he's forced to wear Susan's nightgown while staying over.
- Scarlett's red dress in Gone with the Wind.
- Unsurprising given the setting, the film The Three Musketeers (1956) has a lot of feathered hats. Clothing Damage is frequently emphasized when peoples' hats' feathers get chopped in half.
- Some of the dresses in the Marie Antoinette films.
- The brothel owner in Tank Girl wears a dress with feather arranged like Shoulders of Doom.
- Anakh-Su-Namun wore a feather boa when her men were attacking the O'Connell home in The Mummy Returns.
- A skimpy pink feather outfit is worn in one scene in The Carpetbaggers.
- Victoria at the end of the film of Twilight wears a white feather cape while at the prom.
- The Busby Berkeley Number "Spin A Little Web Of Dreams" from Fashions Of 1934.
- The tiara The High Queen wore at the end of Disney's Atlantis the Lost Empire has large pink and blue feathers coming out of the back.
- In the 1961 version of Babes in Toyland, Mary is given a red cape trimmed with white feathers, and a hand muff of white feathers.
- In My Little Pony: The Movie, Rosedust, the queen of the Flutter Ponies, wears a red feather in her mane.
- Daphne in Unfaithfully Yours owns a dress with plumes at the hips, that is important both in a fantasy and in reality.
Literature[]
- In Inheritance Cycle, the queen of the elves, Islanzadí has a mantle made of swan feathers collected over the years discarded by birds.
- In Planet of the Apes this is inverted; On Soror where man is beast and ape is the dominant species, hair is collected as a trophy. She-apes particularly like women's hair, treating it like feathers, cutting locks of the best specimens from hunts to decorate their hats.
Live Action TV[]
- Common in ballroom dancing dresses, which means this shows up a lot in Dancing With the Stars.
- Many of the outfits in the "Parade of States/Nations" parts of the Miss USA, Miss Teen USA, and Miss Universe pageants.
- Billy on Billy the Exterminator used a feather boa as part of an improvised bee suit early in the series; it didn't work out as the bees could crawl through it and ended up stinging Billy several times on his neck.
- Miss Yvonne of Pee-wee's Playhouse wore some outfits with white feather trim, including a "Happy Holidays" Dress.
- The Fluff Girl outfits (a Fictional Counterpart to the Playboy Bunny) in Adam Adamant Lives are basically one-piece swimsuits trimmed with feathers.
Professional Wrestling[]
- Many wrestling stars wear feathers, like feather boas, but we dare you to mock them over that.
- "Superstar" Billy Graham.
- Jesse "The Body" Ventura.
- Hulk Hogan.
- Ric Flair.
Theatre[]
- Takarazuka productions are also rife with this. Just look them up on YouTube.
- The 1992 production of Guys and Dolls had chicken costumes for "A Bushel and a Peck" that involved large feather tails.
- The "traditional" Las Vegas showgirl wears loads with many of her outfits (often in tandem with a Showgirl Skirt).
Toys[]
- Barbie has some outfits with feathers.
Video Games[]
- Yuna's wedding dress in Final Fantasy X.
- Edea's dress in Final Fantasy VIII
- Lightning's new outfit in Final Fantasy XIII-2 is a Showgirl Skirt of white feathers.
- Aya of OneChanbara wears a feather boa and feather-trimmed bikini.
- The empress's dress in Skies of Arcadia.
- Ling Xiaoyu's dress in Tekken 5 and 6.
- Alita Tiala from Apollo Justice Ace Attorney wears a dress with white feathers on her chest arranged like angel wings, to make her seem sweet and innocent. But like previous seemingly pure and innocent characters, she wasn't, killing that one guy and trying to frame her fiancee.
- Rare male example: Balder from Bayonetta wears not only peacock feathers, but enormous peacock feathers... that come from a dead white peacock he has draped over his shoulder. The feathers later become a part of him when he goes One-Winged Angel (or Twelve Winged Angel, in this case) for his Boss Battle.
- Then there's Jeanne, who has enormous feather tassels on the ends of her guns for most of the game.
- Dance Dance Revolution (Wii) has a sexy angel dress trimmed with white or black feathers, and a similarly trimmed hand fan.
- Gwendolyn's Battle Ballgown in Odin Sphere.
- The showgirl in Bloody Good Time.
- Morrigan of Dragon Age has crow feathers on her ridiculous patchwork outfit, a reference to the Celtic goddess. Anders and Merrill, the mage party members from Dragon Age II, both wear gray feathered pauldrons on their shoulders. This ties into the symbolism of the Feather Motif; as mages, both live in fear of being hunted down and imprisoned for the rest of their lives, and freedom for all mages is Anders's primary motivation. Furthermore, Anders eventually starts wearing black feathers, bringing him closer to the evil/death Ravens and Crows motif (Merrill even tells him he looks like a crow), symbolizing his corruption by the demon of Vengeance possessing him and his decision to blow up the Chantry.
Web Original[]
- The Nostalgia Chick has a white feather boa she wore in her Showgirls review and in her fetish-y guest spot on That Jewish Guy's "Myths About Hanukkah" video.
Western Animation[]
- A George of the Jungle story told of the Oo-oo Birds, whose tail feathers had the effect of making the women who wore them look gorgeous, resulting in a rash of poachers plucking the hapless birds.
- The Dinoco girls from Cars.
Real Life[]
- Feather earrings and hats with feathers on are often in fashion. Same for handbags with feather decoration.
- These hats were very popular in the early 20th century. It had the effect of decimating entire populations of herons, egrets, and other birds with fancy plumage.
- The Fairytale Wedding Dress worn by Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiari, the second wife of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran. See it here and here.
- The pink dress that Angie Harmon wore to the 2011 Screen Actors Guild Awards had a feather neckline and feather skirt. Also the designer based it off an earlier wedding dress she made.
- Cee-Lo Green's performance at the 2011 Grammy Awards used rainbow-colored feathers.
- Bjork's infamous and oft-parodied swan dress that she wore to the Oscars one year. It wasn't just feathers; she rocked the whole bird.
- Beyonce wore a show Fairytale Wedding Dress with a feather-trimmed skirt at the 2009 BET awards.
- The extravagant costumes worn by The Mummers during their annual New Year's Day parade in Philadelphia. Each individual costume has dozens of ostrich feathers, each of which can cost as much as $5. And since some of the clubs have several dozen performers marching down Broad St. in a performance...
- Several outfits worn by female dancers during the Brazillian carnival sport giant, peacocked back feathers.