Camp, the theme of this year’s Met Gala, is almost impossible to define. Here’s our best effort.

Dozens of the world’s most famous celebrities are going to be asked to explain what they think “camp” means, as they all fail to understand it. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute is putting on a themed show at the 2019 Gala, titled “Camp: Notes on Fashion,” which focuses on the aesthetic sensibility of camp. This year’s Gala theme is not about sleeping bags and tents, but rather the concept of camp itself.

There aren’t any intelligent celebrities that I don’t mean. It’s nearly impossible to talk about that camp that I don’t mean. If Susan Sontag can’t turn a full essay into a coherent camp, then it’s just notes. If Susan Sontag can’t turn a full essay into a coherent camp, then it’s just notes. If Susan Sontag can’t turn a full essay into a coherent camp, then it’s just notes. If Susan Sontag can’t turn a full essay into a coherent camp, then it’s just notes.

Interestingly imperceptible, it appears to possess omnipresence and can be found everywhere. In the year 2019, it is one of the prevailing sensibilities of the era, but it is a curious phenomenon. Discussing the camp has become even more challenging, as noted by Sontag in her 1964 writings, since then.

Once again, it is my goal to make it visible and become invisible. It has gained currency and has become fashionable at some level in all aspects, and I have started to think that it is everywhere. I have been working on it since the camp, but not everything said in her essay by Sontag. In October, Andrew Bolton, the curator of the Costume Institute at the Met, told The New York Times.

I’ve turned camp into a series of examples in our culture that show different aspects of the sensibility, so that we can better handle and understand what camp is (and isn’t). This means we will be able to judge celebrity interviews and red-carpet events from the comfort of our own couches, and get a better understanding of the camp culture.

Traditional camping: Oscar Wilde

A sculpture of Wilde lounges against a rock, smirking.
A statue of Oscar Wilde by Danny Osborne in Merrion Square, Dublin.
Wikimedia Commons/Arbol01

If you are trying to decide whether something is pure contempt or pure delight, ask yourself, is it the first golden moment of your life? Oscar Wilde, the 19th-century playwright and poet who wrote “The Importance of Being Earnest,” defined camp as a sensibility that is less defined by aesthetic and more defined by life. That’s why some of Wilde’s famous epigrams sprinkles the essay “Notes on Camp,” which is dedicated to Sontag.

What no one has yet discovered is the second duty. The first duty is to be as artificial as possible in life. She might just as well be quoting the opening phrase from Wilde’s same tract. One should either wear a work of art or be a work of art. This paraphrases Sontag and mirrors Mrs. Cheveley’s lament from An Ideal Husband and Wilde’s quoting of Philosophies and Phrases for the Use of the Young. What Wilde makes is a connoisseur of camp, someone who is processed nearly everything on the level of aesthetics, and based on artifice in all aesthetics.

Naturalism, a style that effaces itself in the name of dullness, is worth more trouble than it’s. It is celebrated for the pleasure it creates and the labor that goes into creating it, which is why style, created artificially, was paramount for Wilde.

One must have a heart of stone to read Nell’s death in Charles Dickens’s most famously sentimental and pathetic child’s death. Sontag famously quipped that it fails to evoke seriousness, calling it what Sontag famously called it, while Wilde’s delight was only heightened when the artifice was accidental, when the artifice was accidental.

“The reason for ‘excessive’ cannot be completely dismissed, but it cannot be completely dismissed because it suggests that art is ‘Camp’ and makes what is genuinely tragic to be too much — once again, the mournful line repeating the tragedy upon which it insists. Incidentally, many readers did fall into wild sobs upon reading it, with the earnest expectation that it would be written in a funny way. It is not meant to be funny precisely because it is considered a camp masterpiece by Wilde, The Old Curiosity Shop’s death of Little Nell.”

Wilde combined both aspects. The inherent sensibility and inherent mode of aesthetics in a piece of art can be interpreted in a way that is camp. The fact that Nell’s Little Death is recognized as an icon of camp is what makes Wilde himself camp.

Wilde lived his life celebrating and acknowledging artifice and style above all else, seeking out the hiding camp in the rest of the world, where his sensibility and aesthetic camped.

Queerness, characterized by its consistent sensibility, is often seen as camp, theatricality, and artifice, as well as its playfulness. Another crucial element of camp is its status as an iconic figure, such as Wilde.

Sontag acknowledges that one central issue of queerness and camp’s sensibility is a curious side, but she writes “someone else would” if she hadn’t invented homosexuals, whether it feels less or more.

Sontag’s writing on camp, specifically her treatment of queerness, is considered by today’s critics to be poorly aged and least apolitical or disengaged. However, her belief that camp is inherently queer has been particularly criticized for its depoliticized approach.

The filmmaker and artist Bruce LaBruce, known for his unconventional approach, writes that homosexuals could face aggressive hostility from the mainstream world. In order to safely operate and express themselves, they developed a secret language, almost like a coded and arcane shorthand, drawing references from kabbalistic practices. This language allows closeted homosexuals or like-minded individuals to identify with each other without fear of detection.

LaBruce states that these signifying practices have become relatively outdated in today’s world, where gays have largely integrated into the dominant social structure, and the previous forms of camping and camp identification have lost their original camp or gay significance, making them susceptible to easy co-optation, commercialization, and trivialization.

Camping in Style: Gucci

“I hate Gucci,” said Francis.

“Do you?” said Henry, glancing up from his reverie. “Really? I think it’s rather grand.”

“Come on, Henry.”

“Well, it’s so expensive, but it’s so ugly too, isn’t it? I think they make it ugly on purpose. And yet people buy it out of sheer perversity.”

“I don’t see what you think is grand about that.”

“Anything is grand if it’s done on a large enough scale,” said Henry.

—Donna Tartt, The Secret History

Gucci is one of the most consistently committed fashion houses to camp, which inherently takes it to a new level, in some ways, of naturalism over artificiality and heightened aesthetics of spectacle on the fashion runway. That’s why if you’ve ever seen its collections, you’ll understand why Gucci is sponsoring this year’s Met Gala.

The author and self-proclaimed “Gucci Bissinger Buzz” is a flamboyant, stylish, hip bad boy rocker who is unafraid to go against the conformity that submerges us into blandness and boredom. He walks around like most men in saggy, sexless sackcloths, but with a heightened excitement that is cinematic, without zombies. Is there anything else beyond being a Gucci addict?

Gucci’s aesthetic is one of flamboyance that reaches the intentional edge of vulgarity, making it good in taste, flattering, and pretty, but it may balk at the point of being opposite to what the world of fashion outside of Gucci considers fashionable.

Boundaries explode to wants. Spectacle wants. Fakery exuberant wants. Taste good or beauty of ideas traditional in interest no has camp, likewise.

A model in a shiny golden suit and a green hat.
A model walks the runway at the Gucci show during Milan Fashion Week on February 20, 2019.
Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images for Gucci

If you can’t pull it off, then it becomes intentionally vulgar. When you combine it with high art and enough good taste, it becomes a bit of a flex: Gucci’s camp fashion becomes a hot combination of conventionally rich and intentionally vulgar elements.

It’s a joyful and absurd parody of artificiality and excess, with models stalking down the runways carrying replicas of their own heads. The mismatched pair of $890 rubber rainbow platforms for running, along with gold leather sneakers from Gucci’s camp, is very Marie Antoinette, according to the Guardian. The power-clashing patterns of giant hats and trompe-l’oeil bows add to the context.

Camp vs. Campiness: Glee

Campiness is filled with self-hatred. It mocks itself while simultaneously adoring itself, and it is whimsical and fond in its mockery, authentic camp. According to her, in Camp, the intricate connection between parody and self-parody is what sets them apart, she explains. Sontag establishes a distinction between “campy,” or what we currently refer to as “camping,” and the superior category of genuine camp.

Some of Hitchcock’s films can be considered campy, such as “To Catch a Thief,” which Susan Sontag reads as a parody of romantic comedies and a parody of a parody. This is why Sontag finds it sublime and even great, because it aspires to be campy and embraces the true “fun” of camp. Campy films do not imagine themselves as having any higher purpose or aesthetic value, as they see no higher aesthetic value in the things they are parodying. Their campiness is ironic and arch, and they embrace self-loathing. This is what makes campy things so unique and valuable.

Parsing out Glee for myself was a constant challenge, and its distinction is quite elusive and complex.

The school shooting episode, “Don’t Stop Believing,” is both the best and worst episode of Glee. It has a level of self-awareness and ambition that transcends the campiness of the show. The overwhelming sense of smarm and the winks to the camera make it feel small and campy to me. It’s a perfect illustration of the distinction between campiness and camp, and it’s a solid argument for why Glee was a teen musical soap running from 2009 to 2015, created by Ryan Murphy.

Glee was a show that occasionally tried to be something meaningful, but it was just campy. It failed sublimely if it was unintentional camp, but it might rise to the level of intentional camp and succeed with enough grandeur.

I turned to Todd VanDerWerff, the originator of the Three-Act Theory and a critic-at-large at Vox, to help figure out where Glee went wrong.

So there you have it, then!

Camp for Straight Individuals: Nicholas Sparks

“How does Nicholas Sparks define the genre of his work as both a filmmaker and author? This whole conversation started with the question of how camp Sparks Nicholas is. But go back and cry, almost kissing white straight people define the genre of his work.

Many people haven’t experienced the same need for a haven. Historically, queer communities and cultures have been rooted in camp, which may not be categorized as pleasurable for them too. As Cam Cronin and Billy McEntee wrote for the “Observer,” some critics have suggested that the desire to treat everything as queer stems from an association with camp, which has historically been associated with queerness. Let me know your thoughts.

Is camp the excessive and artificial nature of Nicholas Sparks’s universe, which revolves around beautiful straight white individuals in love but separated by their class disparities, fatal illnesses, wars, etc.? Their works emphatically emphasize and satirize the conventional notion of heterosexuality.

Camp is the demise of Little Nell, in the same manner that they epitomize camp: with utmost self-indulgence and utmost genuineness, they mock themselves with intense emotions to the point where they passionately embrace under the rain and subsequently pass away in each other’s embrace on the same bed, experiencing their emotions more intensely than anyone else in the world has ever experienced their emotions, just like Allie and Noah in The Notebook.

Political faction: Donald Trump

donald trump on a gold elevator.
Donald Trump during a ribbon-cutting event at Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
Tom Briglia/FilmMagic

The aesthetic mode of a political figure who demands to be taken seriously is perhaps Camp, which combines hard power with vulgarity. Gucci builds unintentional camp by combining high art with vulgarity. They pointedly emphasize artificial stylization, highlighting the endless gold, endless tan spray, and ersatz swirl of hair. Trumpism’s aesthetics are camp at its lowest sense.

When it comes to treating real human beings, it is dangerous for politics to start treating that nonsense and ridiculous matter as if it doesn’t matter. Nihilism has a tendency toward a sense of everything being ridiculous and nothing matters, which can be seen as fun in art. However, when nihilism enters the camp of politics, it becomes dangerous. The camp’s rendering process brings about reckless cruelty and playfulness, and it has taken Trump out of the realm of aesthetics and into the realm of politics.

Politics is hazardous and art is precious, so it is intriguing to investigate what promises the “Fashion on Notes: Camp” exhibit at the Met in New York holds. The curator, Bolton, stated that camp is a significant aspect of Trump’s “parade-like” culture and the intersection of fashion, making it a timely and relevant theme for this year’s Met Gala. Ultimately, it feels like “Trump” is the central figure in the exhibit “Fashion on Notes: Camp”.