*** ----> Fashion's feather master tickles up a storm | THE DAILY TRIBUNE | KINGDOM OF BAHRAIN

Fashion's feather master tickles up a storm

Paris : 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 told AFP. "It was love at first sight." 

The thrill has never quite left him.

"I made my first wedding dress that year out of feathers and plastic," he recalled.

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.

His creations have been worn by stars from Madonna and Karlie Kloss to Heidi Klum and the burlesque star Dita Von Teese, who he says has "the most perfect, beautiful, graceful body I have ever seen".

In fact, Serkan 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" -- he also spent a decade learning corset making at the feet of the legendary Mr Pearl.