CAMP: Notes on Fashion

The Metropolitan Museum’s CAMP: Notes on Fashion was a far departure from 2018’s exhibition focusing on Catholicism’s heavy influence on fashion, featuring haute couture. “Camp: Notes on Fashion” derives its name from Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” which unfolds in list form because “jottings … seemed more appropriate for getting down something of this particular fugitive sensibility.” Camp, Sontag writes, is all about artifice, exaggeration, and superficial style over content, and yet it’s “dead serious.” Though she only references two examples of fashion in her essay — “women’s clothes of the twenties,” and “a dress made of three million feathers” — Sontag notes that clothes are frequently the vehicle for a camp sensibility.

A lot of people were confused about what CAMP was. Fortunately or unfortunately it didn’t have much to do with roughin’ it in the woods. To the contrary actually CAMP was supposed to be about theatrics, about irony, about humor, extravagance, decadence - to me, it was a theme that took back the MET Gala to its costume routes. CAMP also often defined as a behaviour, the act of being “over the top” and left a lot of room for celebrities to explore every corner of the fashion world.

The exhibition was fun, a little claustrophobic, smaller than previous years - resembled a cross between a Glossier showroom and a Gucci perfume photoshoot. The curation was historically linear, first exploring the origins of camp’s exuberant aesthetic and how the sensibility evolved from a place of marginality to become an important influence on mainstream culture.