A tall woman wears short feathers in her headdress and a short woman wears tall feathers in hers

Gillray's etching skewers the absurdist extremes of fashionable headdress plumage at a London assembly or ball. A tall, décolletée woman sports a modest spray of feathers while her squat companion — rendered with the bulging eyes and compressed features typical of period comic physiognomy, a class and physical caricature meant to register as grotesque — wears an ostrich-feather tower nearly her own height. A chandelier and fan-wielding crowd press the background. The joke is pure inversion: nature's proportions mocked by vanity's compensations. Gillray worked in etched line with aquatint wash, the medium's acid bite perfectly suited to social ridicule. This tradition of printed satire — running from Hogarth's moral sequences through Rowlandson and later Daumier — taught sequential artists that pictures alone could carry narrative irony, directly seeding the comic strip form.