Birds: They try to kill us with viruses and we reward them by screening their silhouettes onto our skirts and wallets.
For several years now, the bird has been a design go-to, gracing many a Roman blind and last-minute birthday card. Now, The Wall Street Journal has declared a high-fashion "avian invasion," noting that the recent collections were filled with bird images, including Carolina Herrera's bird-printed shifts and Reed Krakoff's gyrfalcons on T-shirts and dresses.
Designers have always found inspiration in the natural world, deploying feathers and silkworms and earth tones. But natural elements make for a curious juxtaposition with the artifice of fashion, sometimes bordering on parody. In the midst of global environmental peril – surely the existence of a bikini-topped patio party in mid-March in Toronto is evidence enough? – a Jil Sander shirt with a hummingbird on it ($260) can seem ironic, even exploitative: Oh, we humans love nature, but mostly just on our clothing.
It seemed like the bird fetish might have faded out more than a year ago, when the popular show Portlandia ran a sketch of two insufferably hipster designers visiting a vintage store and applying birds to every teapot and tote, declaring: "Put a bird on it!" The sketch was scathing enough that anyone with a large metal bird hanging on a kitchen wall felt a little sheepish. The show's co-creator, Carrie Brownstein, explained the evolution of the idea to Salon: "I had started noticing that putting a bird atop an otherwise pedestrian or utilitarian object elevated it to art – or that putting a bird on a painting made it an instant signifier for coolness."
The Salon article interviewed shopkeepers who felt their bird-related products had taken a hit post- Portlandia. Economic ripple effects from comedy are difficult to measure, but, anecdotally, I have noticed that it is now impossible to give the aforementioned bird-print birthday card without some smartass chiming in: "Put a bird on it!"
The fact that, despite this takedown, birds are now on runways points to a not-so-shocking divide between the hipster audience of a cult show like Portlandia and haute couture: Krakoff says he took inspiration for his gyrfalcons prints from 19th-century naturalist engravings, not Brooklyn craft fairs. Perhaps the stubborn staying power of the bird is some postmodern kaleidoscope of trendspotting in which British designer Giles Deacon ironically references Portlandia's Fred Armisen, who is ironically referencing Etsy, where some bird sock-maker may sincerely love 19th-century bird engravings. (Further contemplation of that particular meta-spiral will cause explosion of heads, both bird and human.)
The question, then, is: Why does the bird endure? Images of nature are profitable commercial tools, tapping into a primal longing. The farther away society moves from nature, the stronger the yearning for what's missing – and market forces love yearning. There's probably no point farther from nature than fashion weeks, with their flashbulbs, Kanye Wests, Rooney Maras and 14-year-old models strutting to techno. Put a bird on it and there's an instant whiff of nostalgia for a simpler time.
Surely the fashion-nature disconnect hits Canadians in a unique way. For a fleeting moment a few years ago, it seemed like the deer was crowding out the bird in design, popping up in Marcel Dzama's pipe-smoking deer art and on cocktail napkins.
The noble deer nodded at a romantic 20th-century Canada of national parks and canoes, a cultural identity defined by man vs. nature poetry and Margaret Atwood's Survival. Now, the deer head is a popular cardboard art piece, made in Virginia and ironically mounted above downtown fireplaces. Nature has become a retro party favour for a country shifting from rural to urban.
On mugs and T-shirts, birds are harmless whimsy, ignoring the whole bird flu issue. Birds are in the oeuvre of the quirky: the Zooey Deschanel-type cupcake-loving-ukulele girl likes birds, which is either charming or insidious, depending on where you stand. In this way, the birding of design is a version of Japanese kawaii, the obsession with cute, sexless, helpless cartoon creatures and a permanent, giggling adolescence that makes for a nice distraction from the hard knocks of adulthood. Putting a bird on it is of a piece with Charlize Theron in Young Adult, a messed-up perpetual prom queen sporting a Hello Kitty T-shirt well into her 30s.
But the new collections return some dignity to those poor, neutered birds. There's ferocity in Nicholas Kirkwood's feathered pump, and something shamelessly loud and aggressive in Kenzo's parrot-printed pants. These new fashion birds are more beautiful than cute, more startling than purely decorative. They remind us not only of what's lost, but celebrate what's still around, flipping the bird at the fashion-nature disconnect.
Follow Katrina Onstad on Twitter: @katrinaonstad