'Tropical elegance in a box': how the pink flamingo became an American icon

Sculptor Don Featherstone, who died on Monday aged 79, was the inventor of the plastic pink flamingo lawn ornament that became an icon of aspirational suburban values of the 1950s and, later, a symbol of postmodern, ironic detachment that more than hinted at a sense of cultural superiority.

For Featherstone, who designed the bird for Union Products’ Plastics for the Lawn line from pictures in a National Geographic magazine spread, the bird was a surprise hit – and the start of a cultural craze.

The company had tried marketing ducks, geese, swans, even ostriches, but nothing came close to the success of the flamingo, with its echoes of Florida exotica, that went on to sell 20m pairs.

Asked in 2007 to explain why he thought the plastic pink flamingo had, so to speak, taken off, Featherstone told the Chicago Tribune: “We sold people tropical elegance in a box for less than $10. Before that, only the wealthy could afford to have bad taste.”

But was bad taste what the sculptor had in mind? He once told reporters that he saw repetitive suburban neighbourhoods as a vast blank canvas for his art.

“You had to mark your house somehow,” Featherstone, who rose to become president of the company before retiring in 2000, recalled. “A woman could pick up a flamingo at the store and come home with a piece of tropical elegance under her arm to change her humdrum house.”

According to film director John Waters, who took the title Pink Flamingos for the most notorious film starring his transvestite star Divine in 1972, the baggage of ironic bad taste came years later.

Waters’ film, a memory-searing, garish romp through shock and schlock that, along with his Female Trouble, remains a staple of formative late-night teen viewing, is notorious for the closing scene in which Divine consumes freshly laid dogshit.

“I gave it that title because the movie was so full of bad taste I wanted to have an innocuous, underplayed title,” Waters explains.

Growing up, the director had seen the ornaments outside poor, country homes. Mostly he recalls, they were made of plaster, perhaps predating Featherstone’s plasticised variety, and often accompanied by a blue gazing ball – lately adopted by artist Jeff Koons – and a wishing well.

“I thought they were touching folk art for modest people’s homes. They were certainly not out there for irony.” His choice of title, then, was emphatically not designed to mock. People at the time were collecting 30s, not 50s kitsch.

“In my movie, weirdly, I was trying to show respect. Divine was living in a trailer, retired and trying to write her memoirs in peace.” The flamingo, which ultimately melts when the trailer catches fire, symbolises urban tranquillity.

Later the bird became associated with gay culture, bad taste and Waters himself. On one occasion, in Florida, Waters was invited to pose with a flock of real-life birds. It was, he recalls, a fruitless undertaking. “Of course, you can’t get near a pink flamingo. There were herds of them and they ran. We couldn’t even get one in the same frame.”

The 50s craze for bright colours, and of Florida as a winter destination, contributed to a boom of flamingo-themed hotels, motels, and lounges. There was the doo-wop group, the Flamingos; the lawn ornament inspired “flocking”, in which charitable neighbours “flocked” to bird-free lawns with the ornaments.

In her 1999 exploration of the modern American relationship to nature, Flight Maps, Jennifer Price wrote at length about the flamingo phenomenon, concluding that “most common and everyday encounters with the natural world take place through mass-produced culture”.

But the counterculture of the 60s rejected the plastic pink flamingo of their parents’ generation and sales declined. By 1970, Sears had replaced the bird with natural-looking fountains and rocks.

The pink bird was also adopted by aspirational postwar society in Germany. Sigmar Polke added the bird’s slender lines to his work. As critic David Thistlewood noted in Back to Postmodernity, in Polke’s critical rendering of a bird that had been “readily absorbed into the petit bourgeois domestic idyll, with its smug sense of being home-made”.

Featherstone and wife Nancy, who kept 57 birds in their back garden, seemed to poke fun at the avians, their plastic copies, and themselves when they described in the Guardian two years ago how, for 37 years, they had dressed alike.

“We have four wardrobes of twin outfits, hanging two by two, organised by season and occasion.”

Featherstone’s contribution was recognised in his home state in 1987 when the governor of Massachusetts proclaimed the plastic bird “an essential contribution to American folk art”. That’s certainly the way Waters, who received dozens of them as gifts from fans, would like to see the pink flamingo garden ornament. “After they became a hipster thing and people would put a hundred of them on their lawn, I gave mine away.”

• This piece was amended on 24 June 2015; Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, not Pink Flamingos was John Waters’s directoral debut.