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. The pink flamingo was born the next year. (His first product, the polyethylene “Charlie the Duck,” actually outsold his flamingo for decades.)
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. 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.”
Then, in the 1960s, there was a revolt against middle class taste, often by the very children of the middle class. 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.”
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