The Met Gala is an annual fundraising event for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute where fashion and celebrity often collide. It always manages to raise eyebrows and this year's theme, Camp: Notes on Fashion, has generated much debate. A common question many fashionistas and cultural critics are asking of each outfit is "but is it camp?"
This kind of overly analytical and far too serious commentary on a sensibility that is supposed to mock such things is intriguing but not surprising given how the concept of camp has evolved.
In 1964, author Susan Sontag penned perhaps her most influential essay, Notes on Camp. It was one of the first attempts to try to pin down camp's qualities and parameters. It's clear why she chose to write some notes rather than a formal essay; because camp is a sensibility or a way of perceiving the world, it is quite difficult to treat systematically. In fact, Sontag would say that it often defies the very idea of systematisation. For Sontag, camp is "the love of the exaggerated, the 'off', of things-being-what-they-are-not", and though it is not merely visual, it has often been expressed in the visual styles of decor, architecture, cinema and fashion.
Certain aspects of Art Nouveau, old Flash Gordon comics, women's clothes of the 1920s like feather boas and fringed garments, celebrity dandies and "sissies" like Oscar Wilde and Paul Lynde, "overwrought" performances by classic Hollywood actresses such as Bette Davis and Judy Garland and so on. Key to camp is a sense of affectation, of style over substance. But equally important is the way one looks at those things, how one appreciates affectation.
