IN THE BEGINNING of the Western world’s obsession, feathers were for men. Like their counterparts in the avian world, males during the Renaissance — royalty and burghers alike — strutted about in extravagant plumage, from Henry VIII in a feathered beret to Matthäus Schwarz, a dandyish German accountant who once wore a headdress of 32 ostrich feathers that was nearly 18 inches high and more than three feet wide, as chronicled in a record he kept of all his clothes. (The Cambridge University history professor Ulinka Rublack says the look “was part and parcel of a new taste for power.”) Two centuries later, women had mostly claimed the accessory as their own, but even now, military officers continue to wear plumes, like the Italian Bersaglieri, an elite infantry corps who stride into combat — whether in Libya in the early 20th century or Afghanistan this past decade — in helmets with shaggy black grouse feathers hanging off to one side.

Nevertheless, the American conservationist William T. Hornaday, writing in The New York Times in 1913, attributed the decline of bird species solely to women, railing against the “raging, insistent, unappeasable” vanity of the sex. True, women were the primary customers fueling the trade, but it was also women who helped put an end to its wantonness, from Coco Chanel, with her scandalously spare, undecorated straw boaters, to American suffragists who founded Audubon Society chapters in the 1890s and pressured Congress to stop the slaughter of nongame birds. By 1918, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act had banned the hunt, sale and purchase of feathers of most birds in the wild; threatened species rebounded. Today, the feathers that float down fashion’s runways come from domesticated birds and less vivid barnyard fowl — bred not for style but food, with feathers as a byproduct — or are clipped from live ostriches, who grow new ones. Thanks to regulations in the West, American and European designers are able to find feathers from responsible and sustainable sources.

For despite the many vicissitudes of fashion, these adornments still beguile us, bringing otherworldliness to the human form. “Nothing synthetic can replicate something so majestic,” the New York milliner Gigi Burris says. Even a single well-placed feather can make a radical statement. The London milliner Stephen Jones created knit beanies for Marc Jacobs’s fall 2019 show, modeled after the classic American watch cap, so simple they were almost plain-spoken, save for a feather flourish: Some had a lone sea-gull-colored feather set rakishly askew à la Robin Hood, others a raven-black fountaining tuft resembling a military officer’s hackle. They were thickly settled on dresses and coats, too — one so saturated in feathers, with thousands embroidered onto silk organza, that it almost looked like fur.

In Burris’s work, feathers are similarly manipulated into abstractions of texture and movement on her hats and headpieces. “They have the same spirit as cobwebs,” she says. Traditional plumes might be supplanted by burnt ostrich feathers, hand-dipped in acid to strip off the frizz, leaving the stark outline of spine, as of something fossilized. It’s a modern effect achieved through a technique so arcane Burris had to go to a feather workshop in Italy to find a plumassier (an ornamental feather specialist) experienced enough to do it. In what has become her signature, she curls and twists goose biots — wispy fibers taken from the primary wing feathers, commonly used to tie flies for fishing — until they look “like barbed wire or fireworks.” The trickiness and delicacy of feathers and the close attention they require are part of the appeal, especially at a time when “everything is fast and casual,” Burris says.