Fashion trends from the past can easily look dated. But have you heard about the Victorian obsession with insect jewelry?
British starlet Lillie Langtry had few resources early in her career. So when she received an invitation to a ritzy royal ball, she donned dead butterflies instead of jewels. As Langtry explained, her yellow tulle gown held “preserved butterflies of every hue and size” in “glittering captivity.”
“The Prince of Wales told me that, the morning after, he picked up many of the insects, which were lying about the ballroom floor,” Langtry admitted.
Langtry was not alone in her appreciation for Victorian insect jewelry––in fact, she was on trend. Ladies wore hummingbird heads on their bodices and hung beetles from their ears. But why were birds and bugs on trend, and how far were fashionable ladies willing to go?
Birds and Bugs in Fashion
Scarab jewelry, elaborate hats with birds’ nests, and countless exotic feathers drove the fashion frenzy. “Truly a fashionable toilet is becoming a composite thing, with dead birds and butterflies . . . and Mexican bugs as jewelry, held by golden chains,” reported Entomological News.
In the 1860s, an American lady’s magazine raved about the latest fashion trend. The New York showroom of Madame Tilman, which showcased the latest Parisian fashions, put nature on display. The shop’s bonnets and hats featured “humming-birds, butterflies and all kinds of brilliant winged insects lighting or seemingly flitting among the beautiful exotics.”
The magazine gushed over the “exact reproduction of nature” at the store, noting “the birds and butterflies are of course perfect, being the real birds and insects preserved and mounted.”
A few months later, the magazine returned to tell readers that the “ornithological and entomological fevers, which broke out last spring, will continue with increased violence throughout the winter.”
Natural History and Victorian Insect Jewelry
Why did Victorian ladies want to wear dead birds and insects? Fashion trends followed the 19th-century obsession with natural science. At the time, the public flocked to botanical gardens and natural history museums, where the advances of modern science were on display.
Victorians also brought nature into their homes. They displayed taxidermied animals on their walls and filled terrariums with ferns and frogs. Shells and fossils decorated mantels, while bookshelves overflowed with memoirs from traveling naturalists.
“Society demands that objects of natural history should not be all relegated to the forgotten shelves of dusty museums, but live as ‘things of beauty and joys forever,’” declared one author in an 1884 guide to taxidermy.
It’s no surprise that nature also influenced fashion.
Live Insect Jewelry in the Victorian Era
Fashionable ladies quickly went beyond wearing butterfly prints or pairing yellow and black––some wanted to wear live insects.
In 1891, a certain lady attended social events wearing a live beetle decorated with a diamond. The creature fluttered around her neck on a chain, giving the illusion of a diamond necklace. Other ladies dotted their hair with live fireflies which “flashed and gleamed and glowed as never diamonds did.”
Live lizards also became a fashionable adornment, which women attached to their bodices with miniature chains. The New York Times reported in 1894 that the city hosted 10,000 of the little lizards.
Naysayers wondered what would be next. One writer worried that “the fashionable hat of the coming period will have for its chief ornament a lobster looking round the brim, or a mackerel sitting on its tail.”
While living lobster hats never came into fashion, insect-inspired jewelry tantalized Victorian ladies.
The Backlash Against Naturalist Fashion
Trendy fashions often face a backlash. And in the 19th century, detractors claimed that the demands of fashion would transformed ladies into monstrosities. As the satirical magazine Punch joked, women had begun to look like wasps and beetles in their desire to imitate nature.
But the fashion trend also had a dark side. Fueling the fashion trend required the harvesting of millions of animals.
“Not content with her slaughter of the innocents in the matter of birds, Dame Fashion has extended her murderous designs to moths and butterflies,” warned Entomological News in 1890.
In the U.S. alone, an estimated 5 million birds died annually for the hat trade. According to Good Housekeeping, a single feather rustler killed 40,000 turns in one season to make hats.
“Humanitarians and reformers may labor to save the birds,” lamented the Norfolk Virginian in 1897, “but these labor in vain and will so long as fashion says to womankind wear wings, and mirrors tell the fact, fatal to birds, that feathers are becoming.”
Eventually, fashion trends changed and women stopped scooping up beetle carapaces and hummingbird heads as accessories. But for a brief moment, Victorian insect jewelry was all the rage.
For more strange and fascinating stories from history, check out Bruce Wilson’s book Strange but True Stories: Fascinating Facts, Astonishing Trivia, and Conversation Starters from History, available in ebook, paperback, or audiobook.