He’s the man who makes feather dresses for Madonna, Victoria’s Secret and Dita Von Teese: meet Serkan Cura
Jean Paul Gaultier tried to poach him, Mr Pearl taught him to make corsets, and some of his creations sell for six-figure sums – Belgian plumassier is flying high
Serkan Cura was first tickled by the possibility of feathers when he was just 13.
“I found a bird of paradise feather in a street market in Brussels,” he says. “It was love at first sight ... I made my first wedding dress that year out of feathers and plastic.”
The thrill has never quite left him. Two decades later Cura is one of the world’s top plumassiers – a leading exponent of an art that goes back to before Cleopatra, who loved to make dramatic entrances from behind fantails of ostrich feathers.
Cura’s creations have been worn by stars from Madonna and Karlie Kloss to Heidi Klum and the burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese, who he says has “the most perfect, beautiful, graceful body I have ever seen”. In fact, Cura was so taken with her that he had a tailor’s dummy made with her “dimensions” for his workshop.
Having cut his teeth working with the French designer Jean Paul Gaultier, who tried to poach him from Antwerp’s famed Royal Academy of Fine Arts – “I stayed on and finished my diploma and then joined him” – Cura also spent a decade learning corset making at the feet of the corsetier to the stars known only as Mr Pearl.