Peacock Feather Wedding Dress

This is a pretty amazing dress. However, though I am not superstitious, there is a persistent superstition in my culture that says peacock feathers are bad luck. I don't know that they would be apprpriate for a bride given that symbolism.

Guess $1.5mil doesnt buy good taste. It's pretty neat but still tacky

Wow, what a way to capture the beauty of one of the world's most amazing birds; kill a whole lot of them, take their feathers, and sew them into a dress that will be worn one day. Awesome...

Waste.

To be fair, do we know that peacocks must be killed for their feathers?

Regardless, it's a hideous dress.

101 dalmatians anyone.

it is sad but at the same time, it is beautiful. but i doubt I'd waste money like that. Then again, weddings are a waste of money.

Ditto mattytiz.... my thoughts exactly. Hideous dress...

And it's machine washable!

Effin disgusting. Let's skin the person that made this, and make a dress out of them.

I'm just wondering how many peacocks were killed to make this? Unless the feathers are just plucked out from the peacocks like how they remove wool from sheep...

The dress is quite ugly though...the effort didn't really pay off.

Have they lost their minds? Whoever did this is going to hell (in a handbag).

Does it say anywhere that they had to kill the birds to take their tale feathers? Christ, I hope that's not the case. It's a lovely dress but not worth killing rare birds for.

Actually, the feathers are gathered after they molt after mating season and then used, but the alarmists here would love to pretend that these birds are getting slaughtered for them so that they can express a little righteous anger.

Only poachers kill them to obtain the feathers, which is apparently an issue in India.

What Evilbeagle said. I used to collect peacock feathers all the time when I lived in the mountains. They're just scattered everywhere.

It's actually illegal to shoot/poison them for their feathers from what I just read, too, violet, and they have tests that can show whether the feather came from a dead bird or a live one.

I do find the knee jerk outrage to this story amusing, though. It doesn't take a whole lot to Google something.

All I have to say is that I find it rather disgusting to think that while wearing this dress, you have feathers plucked (or fell of) a birds skin. To me that is just nasty!

My family used to raise peacocks and They drop feathers, but not that many! I had a dozen of them and only received a hand full of feathers every year. This ether took years to make, was done from a farm of hundreds of peacocks or they were plucked or slaughtered to do this.

I just still think that it is disgusting and very ugly. The feathers might be beautiful, not they are not made to be word my humans!

Yet more proof that conspicuous consumption is rarely attractive.

volcanogirl73, while you are certainly entitled to your opinion on how this looks or how it skeeves you out, the feathers are not typically sourced from slaughtered birds, which is why poaching them in India and probably a lot of other places is illegal. I know it's fun to imagine that someone needs to save these helpless birds from being killed by evilbadnasty people for their feathers, but the people who are doing this for profit very likely have more of them than you have ever seen in one place, as well as years of collecting them. They aren't cheap and there is a surprising demand for them. It would make no sense to kill the bird for them if you are running a business. It would be like shearing the sheep and then killing them because they are now bald.

Look it up. Google is your friend.

Dead birds, live birds... whichever.. it's still an ugly dress.

I was surprised to read that everyone thought birds had to be killed for their feathers. It's not a bird skin dress.

Evilbeagle,

If you read, I did mention that they MIGHT have been slaughtered, but I said..

"This ether took years to make, was done from a farm of hundreds of peacocks or they were plucked or slaughtered to do this."

I honestly don't think that they would slaughter them. that would be a big mistake in this day and age.

I love peacocks, but I personally could not imagine wearing this dress. A few here or there, but not the entire thing. They are a beautiful bird.

Again, my family did raise them at one time and I don't need Google. I am glad that you are concerned for their well being and that is not being sarcastic in any way. Thank you for caring. Remember, many people made comments on this and not just me.

volcanogirl73,

I apologize if it seemed I was picking on you. I actually had a great laugh at the expense of others here that couldn't be bothered to even look into how we acquire the feathers to begin with. I did see what you said, but had to point out that the likelihood of their being slaughtered for the feathers was so slim as to not even be a possibility because there is no need for it. So why even contemplate it and get people worked up over nothing?

I actually don't care for the feathers. As I mentioned, I am not personally superstitious, but it's been so engrained that they are bad luck, I kind of find the feathers off putting. I'm also not a great fan of the bird because the noise they make is a bit grating. Regardless, I do think the dress is pretty amazing, though it's not necessarily something I would wear either. It seems to me one would have to be pretty tall to pull off that look and I am not. :P

I will be the first to admit that I wear leather boots and use other animal products, but if I thought a dress like that had come from dead birds, I would be pretty bothered by it as well. That's a lot of feathers!

um, isn't it the male who has these feathers?

@ Evilbeagle, severely off topic, but you mentioned their noise. I wrote a children's story called How the Peacock Got Its Voice, and it goes that they once had beautiful, mesmerizing songs, but they used them to entrance and enslave all the other animals with it, until one day a snake came around (snakes are deaf) and couldn't be enchanted. The snake steals the voice of the peacock and replaces it with the sounds of desperate mourning from all the baby animals whose mothers had been enslaved by the peacock. And That Is How the Peacock Got Its Voice.

Now that I'm remembering that story, it's hell of creepy. Maybe not the best bedtime tale for the wee ones?

@violet

I love it!!! That is so cool, and yeah, it's creepy, but creepy is what my mother would have to read to me to keep me entertained when I was little, so I bet there are a lot of kids out there that would totally dig it.

I never realized how much I didn't like the sound they made until my husband and I were at an otter reserve where they had a bunch of them hanging around. There was a wood there, and we were the last guests there at nearly sundown, and they started making that sound and it was echoing... creepy. That did it for both of us. We had to get out of there.

Love the righteous indignation at the peacock-killing idea.

It just doesn't look right to have a woman wearing the male bird's feathers. Maybe they should have made a peacock feather tuxedo instead.

Hey all.
Im currently making a peacock dress for my project.. they shed their feathers so if they had access to a lot of them then they wouldnt have been killed!
I agree..is a beautiful dress but yes tacky..More couture than anything!

I commented on another website about this dress being exquisite, but now seeing the bodice.... it has been ruined. The bodice is made of tacky elderly-home fabric and it spoils it. If Galliano had made this Im sure it would have been executed with more sophistication with a cleaner, sharper bodice cut in an expensive fabric.

so i really love the color of peacock feathers but that many feathers had to be at LEAST 50 peacocks

For all the bird lovers who think these peacock were killed, India is right next door to China. The peacock is India's national bird and it is against the law to kill them. India is a big damn country with a lot of peacocks and a lot of poor people. Many of the country's destitute make a few pennies here and there collecting moulted peacock feathers and bringing them to a central collection facility where they are paid for what they bring in. And that is pretty much the source of the entire world's commercial supply of peacock feathers. The birds are fine. They get better treatment than the Indian peasants that collect their feathers.

I knew a woman who owned a peacock herself and she did not kill her peacock to get the feathers to make her, hmm, I guess you could call them costers. I believe she just took the feathers that naturally fell off.

any idiot would know that tail feathers grow and fall out quite regularly, you can buy them in shops in wildlife conservation parks!!! the dress has its own charm, but i would not wear something like it fr my wedding.