Oh stuff it - taxidermy is the new game in town

At just 25, Bethnal Green-based Polly Morgan became a hit in the art world after selling a taxidermied rat in a champagne flute to collector Vanessa Branson. Pigeons, quails, kingfishers, moles — you name it, she's stuffed it. Four years on, her work now sells for up to £60,000 and she's the figurehead for a trend that is bony, feathered, beady-eyed and seemingly omnipresent.

Once the preserve of old curiosity shops and Fawlty Towers-esque hotels (anyone for a moose?), taxidermy is suddenly a source of not horror but fashion envy. From Islington's Get Stuffed to dsign galleries and the Comme des Garçons shop in Dover Street Market (where for £5,000 you can get yourself a vintage stuffed head of a bear, leopard or tiger), taxidermy is back in fashion.

In Dover Street Market, butterflies (eat your heart out Vladimir Nabokov) start at £450. It's all vintage and sourced by Emma Hawkins, who has also provided the store with skeletons: from a giraffe's head to birds and rodents. In Bruton Place, design gallery Sebastian +Barquet's current show is by fashion designer Rick Owens, who has crossed over into furniture with love seats made of beaver, and who fashions coffee tables out of antlers and bone.

"It's a medium like anything else, like painting or photography," says Morgan, taxidermy's poster girl. The proof of the (bird) pie is in the udding. She started out wanting to decorate her flat in Hoxton Square and shrugging off her mother's fears that her fascination was "morbid".

"I just thought it would be really cool to have a rat running across a room," she says. Next month, a bird cage carried aloft by hundreds of birds will be showing in the exhibition The Age of the Marvellous, organised by curator Joe LaPlaca and installed in Holy Trinity in Marylebone. Polly's sculpture, inspired by a drawing of a Victorian invention, will be in the altar.

While Morgan, whose obsession is professional, has farms supplying her with hundreds of chicks that haven't survived, poet Julia Bird has just one bird, a jay, which she bought from Get Stuffed, the one-stop taxidermist's paradise on Essex Road. She says she wishes she could afford more taxidermy, and yet admits that it provokes a complicated reaction. "I love and am repelled by it," she says.

The theatre world, too, seems fascinated by that contradiction. For a production of a play about a taxidermist, The Tin Horizon at Theatre 503 in Battersea, they managed to persuade Kate Moss and Noel Fielding to lend pieces for the set (Moss was another of Morgan's early patrons, buying a robin in a bell jar). Another taxidermy play, Gilbert is Dead, opens in November at the Hoxton Hall, and is set in an 1860s taxidermy museum.

"There's the slightly macabre fascination with death. The spirit is gone and there's just this shell," says director Bob Wolstenholme, "and yet, on the other hand, for me, animals are brilliant. You get to have a really good look."

Morgan, too, is proof that a love of animals can be a motivation. She wanted to be a vet and says that stuffing something "is the closest that you get". Five or six years ago, when his favourite Argentine frog died, actor Toby Mace had her stuffed. Back then, he says, it was incredibly hard to find someone to do it. These days Morgan is inundated with work-experience applicants.

The must-have taxidermy soft furnishing of the minute says it all. A taxidermied grey squirrel lamp, designed by Alex Randall, to slither up your wall, exudes a heady dose of nostalgia for the Victorians who released them into parks to watch them play. As you stroke its tail and flick on the light you can rest assured that it wasn't murdered but culled by the Forestry Commission. Is it a rodent? Is it art? Yours for £340.