Earlier this week, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that next year’s Costume Institute exhibition will be titled “Camp: Notes on Fashion.” For inspiration, curator Andrew Bolton looked to Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” which includes no fewer than 58 definitions for the word. Easiest to understand is this: Camp encompasses everything and anything that is considered by most to be naturally humorous, ridiculous, or profane in our collective culture. In fashion, it means bold, ironic, and, more often than not, irreverent aesthetics born out of the wild minds of designers like Thom Browne, Marc Jacobs, and Gucci’s Alessandro Michele. The exhibition will be made possible by Gucci and the iconoclastic Michele will serve as cochair alongside Lady Gaga, Harry Styles, Serena Williams, and Anna Wintour.
Lady Gaga and pop sensation Harry Styles are exemplars of camp in the Instagram age. Gaga is currently garnering rave reviews in A Star Is Born, but never forget this is the woman who wore a dress made of slabs of meat on the red carpet. With his genderless approach to fashion, Styles is more subtle in his pursuit of camp but no less subversive. Williams’s contribution to the subject might be a bit tougher to define, though one can argue that her disruptive, ultrafeminine style on the court—tutus, bodysuits, and loads of color—is a camp-ish reaction to the stiff, monochromatic, and traditionally conservative world of tennis.
Camp’s definitions are vast and at times oblique, but in looking more closely at the cochairs we find some clarity. Whether it’s Michele making us question the codes of high fashion, Gaga poking fun at fame in a wig, Styles wearing a pussy-bow blouse, or Williams hitting a tennis ball in a catsuit, these stars prove that modern camp is in fact all around us, just like Sontag said.
