CAMP: Notes on Fashion

The Met's "Camp: Notes on Fashion" was a sharp departure from 2018's exhibition on Catholicism's influence on haute couture. The show took its name from Susan Sontag's 1964 essay "Notes on Camp," written in list form because, as Sontag put it, jottings felt more appropriate for capturing something so fugitive. Camp, she wrote, is about artifice, exaggeration, and superficial style over content, and yet it is "dead serious." Though she references fashion only twice in the essay, she notes that clothing is frequently the vehicle through which a camp sensibility travels.

A lot of people came in confused, and understandably so. Camp has nothing to do with the woods. It is about theatrics, irony, humor, extravagance, and decadence. To me, it felt like a theme that brought the Met Gala back to its costume roots, and it left enormous room for celebrities to explore every corner of the fashion world.

The exhibition itself was fun, a little claustrophobic, and smaller than previous years, somewhere between a Glossier showroom and a Gucci perfume campaign. The curation followed a historically linear path, tracing the origins of camp's exuberant aesthetic and how it evolved from the margins of culture into a defining influence on the mainstream.