The Marvelous Feather Art of Nelly Saunier

“The art of featherwork, for me, has no limits in its ability to express emotions in all artistic worlds, cultures and mediums around us. It transcends these worlds.”
—Nelly Saunier

Parisian artist Nelly Saunier is a rare breed. She deftly performs a métier only a few in the world can, handling a material as delicate as it can possibly get.

For over three decades, Saunier immersed herself in the world of feather art, also known as plumasserie, surrounding herself with a striking selection of peacock tails, ostrich plumes, and hummingbird feathers, which she painstakingly washes, steams, and meticulously trims into various shapes.

Her work is as extravagant as it is captivating, spurring creative collaborations with distinguished jewellers like Piaget and Van Cleef & Arpels, and with iconic fashion brands such as Givenchy, Nina Ricci, and Jean Paul Gaultier.

Saunier’s lifelong passion for feather art began many years ago, far from Paris’ hottest runways and plush marble-decked boutiques. One day, 14-year-old Saunier was sitting on the thick branch of an oak tree when a bright yellow serin landed a little further away.

When the girl tried to reach out, the bird flew away, but not before leaving a feather behind. Saunier describes this parting gift as having “a hundred shades of gold, with textures as rich as the rising sun.”

The young woman took this chance encounter as an invitation to explore an imaginative new world. “Feathers move, beguile, and inspire me,” Saunier says. “I’m sensitive to the purity and simplicity of nature: birds are born with their own elegance; there is no deception in their appearance.”

While a bird lives a relatively simple life, Saunier’s plumasserie work is anything but mundane. “The art of featherwork, traditionally, is intimately linked to infinite precision and relies on specific techniques so that the creations persist over time while sublimating the medium,” she says.

More than the feathers’ rich colours and patterns, Saunier is drawn to their emotive, almost raw qualities. “Feathers are an extraordinary material—a world within a world.”

Constant learning

Saunier’s success in plumasserie is founded on her continuous pursuit of learning about different bird species and their plumes, and of finding ways of transcending traditional techniques to uncover more innovative and creative ones. She also goes to great lengths to bring out the feathers’ beauty by closely studying every aspect of birds—from their anatomies and behaviour to their eccentricities.

She analyzes how they fly and why, their reaction to the elements of sun, wind and weather, shadows and darkness. Her travels to exotic places and long walks with ornithologists also enlighten her. “This type of learning is a work in progress. My wisdom deepens every day,” she says.

Saunier’s deep understanding of feathers and birds makes her work animated and realistic. “I use drawing as a basis for expressing my ideas, but I also do research on the composition of the feathers: diagrams, sketches, colour pallets, fabric swatches, texture pallet,” she says. “I then visualize the effects, the lines, the resonance of colours, and assimilate them into my work.”

Traversing art disciplines

Saunier’s knowledge-based approach to the craft also helps her adapt her featherwork to other art forms like jewellery-making. During her collaboration with Harry Winston, she worked on crafting intricate pendants, brooches, and watches that married feather, metal, and stone in ways the world of fine jewellery had never before seen.

“Harry Winston is, for me, the beginning of a story in the extraordinarily delicate world of the infinitely small,” Saunier says. “It was necessary to adapt the usual uses of feathers to keep their natural beauty while turning the creation into a wonderful illusion.”

Her long-term partnership with fashion brand Jean Paul Gaultier also resulted in dozens of spectacular pieces, the most memorable of which were a parakeet bolero with a vibrant rainbow plumage and a trompe-l’oeil jacquard sweater in which feathers created the illusion of wool.

The importance of transmission

While feathers were in high demand with the extravagantly plumed pouf and quilled hats of the 17th and 18th centuries and the feathered attires of the 1920s—these days, we see them mainly in haute couture, high jewellery, and watches.

Saunier, however, is determined not to let this craft fade. “I committed myself to pass on this rigorous precision of ancestral know-how, to avoid the disappearance of this tradition so that new generations will understand its use,” she says.

This has been Saunier’s mission for over 20 years. Aside from crafting extraordinary feather art pieces, Saunier has been mentoring the next generation of plumassiers at the Octave Feuillet vocational school in Paris.

These efforts haven’t gone unnoticed, however. In 2008 and 2012, the French Minister of Culture and Communication honoured Saunier with the titles of “Maître d’Art” and “Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres” for her influence in the teaching and crafting of plumasserie.

“He was touched by my long artistic journey and my will to perpetuate and persevere in defending and promoting a rare, endangered expertise in order to avoid its extinction,” Saunier says.

While much of her work revolves around the power of illusion, Saunier is inspired most by the spontaneity, honesty, and expressiveness of the feathers themselves.

“The art of featherwork, for me, has no limits in its ability to express emotions in all artistic worlds, cultures, and mediums around us. It transcends these worlds,” she says.