This year’s Met Gala and corresponding Costume Institute exhibit, “Camp: Notes on Fashion,” are themed around the idea of camp as it’s defined in Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on Camp.” Not familiar? Not to worry. Sontag’s easily Google-able essay is broken down into 58 bullet points that explain what she sees as the camp sensibility. First note: Camp is a sensibility, not an idea.
Some of the 58 points have gone more viral than others. It’s likely that in the lead-up to this year’s gala you’ve come across No. 38: “Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of “style” over “content,” “aesthetics” over “morality,” of irony over tragedy. Or maybe you’ve gotten a whiff of No. 8, which declares camp to be “the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off,’ of things-being-what-they-are-not.”
But what about 27? “Without passion, one gets pseudo-Camp—what is merely decorative, safe, in a word, chic.” Or 56? “Camp is a tender feeling.” Or 9 and 14, which outline the canon of camp figures and fantasies over time?
With a month to go before the Met Gala, we’ve taken it upon ourselves here at Vogue Runway to celebrate some excerpts from Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” alongside looks from the Fall 2019 runways. Met Gala guests, take note.
25. “Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers.”
9. “The androgyne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility.”
31. “So many of the objects prized by Camp are old-fashioned, out-of-date, demodé . . . What was banal can, with the passage of time, become fantastic.”
10. “Camp sees everything in quotation marks.”
13. “The relation of Camp taste to the past is extremely sentimental.”
41. “The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious.”
4. “Random examples of items which are part of the canon of Camp [include] … Swan Lake.”
