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Overview
A peacock feather pelerine
This pelerine or shoulder cape is adorned with trimmed peacock, mallard, and guinea fowl feathers, which have been stitched on to a cotton base in a decorative pattern. The interior of the cape is lined with tufts or pompoms of white down. The pelerine comes with a matching muff (GH017085).
Similar pelerines can be found in museums around the world. Despite their commonality, very little is known about their manufacture and scholars and curators have debated their origins. Some have speculated that they may have been made by Native Americans in the Great Lakes regions while others have argued that they are English made, but Polynesian-inspired or made in South Africa by Chinese featherworkers. Textile conservator, Anna Rose Keefe, has more recently argued that this style of pelerine was made for the European market in Commercolly, India - ‘a famous manufactory for ladies’ boas, muffs and tippets of down and variegated feathers’. In particular, she cites a description in a travel essay, 'Our log, and incidents of voyage to the Cape, Madras and Calcutta' in The United Service Magazine, written by by H Gooch in 1845, in which he describes the purchase of a tippet, which is also lined with tufts of down:
We made our purchases without much regard to utility; mine, however, included a present for home, in the shape of a lady's tippet manufactured of feathers, arranged in a rich variety of colours, and representing the figures seen at the corners of rich English or French flowered shawls, the inside being lined with down as white as the driven snow. In the making of such articles, the natives of India certainly excel, and a rich variety of them are constantly on sale, astonishingly cheap, compared with what they will fetch in England.
For more information see: Keefe, Anna Rose, "Forgotten Fashions: Feather Pelerines of the Nineteenth Century" (2016). Open Access Master's Theses. Paper 950.
https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/theses/950