![]() (To anyone even vaguely acquainted with the Featherstones, the question would have been unnecessary: in an act of connubial solidarity, they wore matching outfits, handmade by Nancy, every day from the late 1970s onward, many of them in flamingo-patterned fabric.)įeatherstone's bird inflamed passions positive and negative. “Someone did that?” came the reply, as if the bird, like its flesh-and-blood antecedent, was a product of Darwinian evolution. With its insouciant stance and saturated pink promise of endless summer, Featherstone's flamingo blew his duck out of the water.Īn index of its novelty that first year could be found in the Sears catalogue, which offered the birds for $2.76 a pair but saw fit to include instructions: “Place in garden, lawn, to beautify landscape.” ‘Someone did that?’Īn index, years later, of how deeply ingrained Featherstone’s creation had become could be found in the response his wife, Nancy, often got when she told people what her husband had invented. Working from photographs in National Geographic, he created a 3ft-high creature, typically sold as one of a pair: one bird upright, the other head down, as if grazing. A recent art-school graduate, he was simply heeding the career advice popularly given to young people of the day: plastics. File photograph: Jeff Hutchens/Getty Imagesįeatherstone had not contemplated creating an enduring emblem of kitsch in 1957, when his first flamingo sailed off the assembly line, or the next year, when the bird was brought to market. Working from photographs in ‘National Geographic’, Donald Featherstone created a 3ft-high creature, typically sold as one of a pair: one bird upright, the other head down, as if grazing. Less hideous than a garden gnome, more politically correct than a lawn jockey, the plastic flamingo has been flaunted in front gardens by the millions feted in films, on television and in song and held up as an object of impassioned pride and equally impassioned prejudice. He named it Phoenicopterus ruber plasticus. But what Featherstone did nearly six decades ago – in the process indelibly altering the landscape of the mid-century US – was to cast the creature in plastic and attach slender, rod-like legs for planting it in the ground.įeatherstone, a sculptor who died on Monday at 79, was the inventor of the pink plastic flamingo, that flagrant totem of suburban satisfaction and, in later years, postmodern irony. “The only way you could see my signature,” he once told Massachusetts’ Telegram & Gazette, “ is: Lay on your back and look up the butt of the flamingo.Don Featherstone did not invent Phoenicopterus ruber: nature took care of that eons ago. The signed objects caused the designer to brag a little, but even then he didn’t take himself too seriously. ![]() On the 30th anniversary of his most famous creation, Featherstone agreed to cast his signature on it, which helped collectors distinguish the many imitations from the originals. In fact, the couple always dressed in matching outfits that she sewed.īesides his wife, he is survived by two children from a previous marriage, Harold Featherstone and Judith Nelson four grandchildren and two-great-grandchildren. ![]() He often wore flamingo-themed clothes, all made by Nancy, whom he married in 1976. ![]() Every summer, he and his wife would display 57 flamingos next to the driveway of their Victorian house. “It’s an honor,” Featherstone said of the Disney character, adding that it was “somewhat like me.”īut if anyone asked what he did for a living, “he never said anything about the pink flamingo,” said Nancy Featherstone, who described her husband as a humble man who never let his unusual success go to his head. The Smithsonian kept a pair, which Smithsonian magazine called “unlikely fixtures of a certain kind of high-end sensibility, a shorthand for tongue-in-cheek tackiness.”Īvant-garde filmmaker John Waters melted some in his 1972 classic about a drag queen, “Pink Flamingos.” Four decades later, Disney made a film about two garden gnomes who fall in love (2011’s “Gnomeo and Juliet”) and named the wisecracking plastic flamingo character after Featherstone. The pink plastic bird became embedded in American culture. He turned to National Geographic, which had run a feature on the creatures it called “Ballerinas in Pink.” After much study, Featherstone sculpted a male-female pair, one with its head erect and the other looking down. This time, Featherstone did not go find a live model. His artificial duck was a hit and led Featherstone’s bosses to suggest a flamingo. ![]()
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