Plastic flamingo
Garden flamingos, known in the U.S. as plastic flamingos, there are a popular garden decoration. Especially in the southern states they are at least as common as garden gnomes in Germany. The flamingos are considered a symbol of kitsch and brought its inventor Donald Featherstone 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for Art a.
Featherstone designed the original Flamingos in 1957 on behalf of Union Products ( Leominster, Massachusetts), a company for garden decorations. He was inspired by pictures in National Geographic.
Overall, more than 20 million figures were sold. At times, more than 100 employees who worked in the factory. In recent years, Wal- Mart was the largest buyer, but these shops sold 250,000 copies per year. Union Products stopped production of flamingos in June 2006 and closed on November 1, finally the gates. It was stated that due to the rising oil prices, the cost of materials for the flamingos were too high.
The Flamingos had - unlike their living models, the bird species of flamingos (Phoenicopterus ) - a yellow bill with black tip and were only sold in pairs for about $ 10. One of about a meter high birds stood upright, a tilted her head to the ground, as if he would eat the grass. They stood on a metal leg. Under her tail was found the signature Featherstone. In Germany they achieved in particular by the computer game The Sims awareness in which they are the cheapest garden decoration. The film Pink Flamingos is named after them and made sure that they were an icon of trash. The professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, Robert Thompson summed up the history of Flamingos together:
"The Pink Flamingo began as a part of the Florida boom and Florida exoticism, went about the trash- culture icon and is now a combination of everything we know. Kitsch, history, simplicity and elegance "