![]() ![]() By the time John Waters’ movie, Pink Flamingos, hit theaters in 1972, the bird had fully transitioned to the realm of ironic kitsch. Happily for flamingo fans, the ‘70s were a carnival of schlock, and by the early part of the decade, the pink flamingo had become so un-cool, it was cool again-this time as a self-conscious symbol of rebellion, outrageousness and all things Bad Taste. By 1970, even Sears had stopped selling the pink flamingo, replacing the gaping hole in their garden department with natural-looking fountains and rocks, writes Jennifer Price in her book Flight Maps. Hippies rallied against the plastics industry, cultural critics chastised all things “un-natural,” and home and garden magazines pleaded with people to abandon the gnomes, lawn jockeys, and flamingos of yesteryear in favor of classier, more natural yard décor. The 1960s were a decade of backlash against conformity, false experience, and all things Parental-including, evidently, Mom and Dad’s lawn décor. When they first hit stores, the blushing birds cost $2.76 a pair and were an immediate hit in working-class subdivisions from the Redwood Forest to the Gulfstream waters. He created the first pink flamingo lawn ornament, his second assignment, in 1957.Īccording to Smithsonian, he used a National Geographic photospread as a reference, and it "took about two weeks to model both halves of the bird, brought into the third dimension by then-revolutionary injection-mold technology." Featherstone, a sculptor, was hired by Leominster, Mass.-based Union Products to make three-dimensional lawn ornaments. Perhaps not shockingly, the pink flamingo lawn ornament was invented in the same decade that polyester pants, pink washing machines, vinyl wallpaper, and Naugahyde lounge chairs were cool. From the plastic bird's birth to its modern perch atop the pyramid of campy Americana, here’s how the hot pink queen of kitsch won over our hearts (and lawns). The pink flamingo lawn ornament was celebrated as a marker of “anything rebellious, outrageous, or oxymoronic.” This reached its apotheosis in John Waters’s 1972 cult classic Pink Flamingos, in which the (anti-)heroine, who lives in a trailer surrounded by pink flamingos, competes for the title of “filthiest person alive.” The pink flamingo had arrived, becoming the “ubiquitous signpost for crossing various, overlapping boundaries of class, taste, propriety, art, sexuality and nature.Today we learned that Don Featherstone, creator of the plastic pink flamingo, died yesterday at the age of 79. Then, in the 1960s, there was a revolt against middle class taste, often by the very children of the middle class. ![]() No matter that actual flamingos had been hunted to extinction before the 20th century in Florida: as icons, they proclaimed “Florida’s cachet of leisure and extravagance.” The first consumers of the pink flamingo lived in working-class subdivisions, while “middle-class suburbanites gave it a wide berth.” There were diverse sources of appeal: the hot pink, a new and exciting color the plastic, the miracle material the exotica of Florida. (His first product, the polyethylene “Charlie the Duck,” actually outsold his flamingo for decades.) The pink flamingo was born the next year. Union Products tapped into the post-WWII spread of suburbanization and the wondrous age of petroleum byproducts to make “plastics for the lawn.” In 1956, they hired Featherstone, fresh out of art school. In the 1930s, concrete animals, especially DIY ones, were the rage. Grottos or swan might be out of the question, but cast aluminum animals, popular in the 1920s, were within reach. ![]() But the appeal of wealthy and middle-class models of nature around the home spread throughout society. ![]() Not everyone could afford a landscape architect, or a gardener, or even a lawn, for that matter. One scholar argues this “symbol of artifice is actually nature incarnate.” ![]()
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