Yesterday (May 6th) marked the 71st Met Gala and it did not disappoint. The event, which, don't forget, is actually a fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute, opened up the Museum's 2019 fashion exhibit entitled Camp: Notes on Fashion and the theme was put to task on the red pink carpet. Superstar pop icons from all mediums turned looks and left many of us gagged and opened up the discussion about what Camp really means.
The Met specifically cites Susan Sontag's 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp'" as the framework of the exhibition (opening May 9th) so it is worth grabbing a few quotes from that.
"Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration...Camp is esoteric -- something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques."
"...the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization."
"Camp is the triumph of the epicene style. (The convertibility of "man" and "woman," "person" and "thing.") But all style, that is, artifice, is, ultimately, epicene."
(Sontag)
The reintroduction of Sontag's essay over 50 years later has allowed a new set of critical eyes to consider what has changed in the past five decades and, indeed, how her attempt to define it differed from that which proceeded her by over 50 years. According to the BBC's review of the Gala, "The first English definition of the term, which appeared in a 1909 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, conformed to popular, contemporary notions of camp: