What the iconic lawn ornament says about class and aesthetics.

Consider the complex aesthetics of the plastic pink lawn flamingo. Its inventor, Donald Featherstone, died Monday at the age of 79. A sculptor by training, Featherstone created the plastic injection-molded flamingo as a 3-D product designer at Massachusetts’ Union Plastics in 1957, and they were an immediate hit. In a time when middle and working-class Americans increasingly found themselves in look-alike suburban tract houses, the pink flamingo was a stake of individuality in the ground, an assertion of aesthetic preference. ... 

. ...  for residents of wealthier, longer established neighborhoods, lawn and garden maintenance was a matter of disecretion, not hot-pink individuality. To purchase of a flamingo for your lawn was to show an earnest, unironic appreciation of inexpensive, mass-produced art objects—the sort that “refined” palates (and their homeowner’s associations) would reject. Already, the pink flamingo was a class marker.Flamingos on the lawn were an expression of “deliberate camp”—a knowing, tongue-in-cheek cultural statement. “We're proud that we've made poor taste affordable for everyone,” Featherstone once told the Hartford Courant.

This turned sour by the 1980s, by which point the plastic flamingo was less of an objet d’art for the working class and more of an inside joke among the upper-middle-class. Nowadays there are businesses that, under cover of night, will place a flamboyance of flamingos (that’s a group of the birds) in your friend’s yard as a deliberately embarrassing birthday salute. There are also “flamingo fundraisers,” in which charity groups “flock” their neighbors’ yards with the ornaments, extracting donations from “victims” in exchange for the removal of the birds. Pink flamingos have become a way of “hinting at one’s own good taste by reveling in the bad taste of others,” as Smithsonian wrote.1.

But the goalposts of taste—and tastelessness—never stop moving.

  • 1. Source: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-tacky-history-of-the-pink-flamingo-18191304/?page=1&no-ist

Even Waters, who these days maintains that plastic lawn flamingos should be kept inside, “like pornography,” hasn’t hardened his heart entirely to the creatures. Visiting his hometown one Christmas, he noticed that Santa’s sleigh had landed in his formerly tasteful childhood yard, drawn by a dashing team of pink flamingos. “I almost cried when I saw that,” he admits. “I thought it was so sweet!”