One of the most anticipated fashion events, MET Gala is on 6th of May. For the ones who do not know what MET gala is for, it is the gala for The Costume Institute of Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; it is also the biggest event on the fashion fundraising calendar. Founded in 1948, the gala has been chaired by Anna Wintour. The co-chairs are mostly well-known celebrities. This year’s co-chairs are Alessandro Michele, Harry Styles, Serena Williams and Lady Gaga.
2019 MET Gala’s theme is “camp”. Since the theme had been announced, there has been many questions but the main one is certainly “what is camp?”. The new exhibition is based on Susan Sonntag’s 1964 essay “Notes on Camp” where she simply describes camp as an unnatural sensibility.
According to Sonntag, all camp objects, or persons, contain a large element of artifice; nothing in nature can be campy. Camp is esoteric, meaning that it is intended or likely to be understood by only a small number of people. What does this tell us about this year’s gala? We should expect flamboyant and extra to an extent that many will find tasteless. Does this remind you any brand? If you have Moschino on your mind, you are correct. The creative director of Moschino, Jeremy Scott is namely the “king of camp” with his out of the ordinary designs.
Sonntag also states that camp “sees everything in quotation marks”. Thus a lamp is not a lamp, but a “lamp”. It is like being-as-playing-a-role. She explains this phenomenon as “the farthest extension of the metaphor of life as theater”. One can immediately think of the young brand Off-White. Known for their quotation marks, some designs of Virgil Abloh, the creative director of the brand, are in fact camp.
Balenciaga under Demna Gvasalia or Gucci under Michele are known to be over-the-top and some of their pieces are part of the exhibition also. These brands are aesthetically subversive. Irony and kitsch are embedded in the DNA of camp. Perhaps Galliano’s Dior SS 2004 show is one of the best examples of it. The Egyptian mythology inspired pieces lack practicality in an iconic way, totally disregarding any thought of sales or wearability. Quoting Vogue, “It is camp because it both succeeds and fails so spectacularly.” This is similar to how Susan Sonntag described camp: “It’s good because it is awful”.
However it should be clear that camp does not reverse things. It doesn’t argue that good is bad, or vica versa. It simply offers a different set of standards for art and life. Pure camp is naive; if camp knows itself to be camping it is less satisfying. If something tries to be campy it loses the beat.
Camp is not only a fashion term. It is the excessiveness of the ambition, not only in the style of work itself, what makes one camp. Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia is camp not only due to the style but due to the ambition of one man that takes a generation, a whole culture to complete. People can be camp, in fact the current US president Donald Trump is described as camp with his caricaturistic existence.
In conclusion, the whole point of camp is to dethrone the serious, be playful and do this in a natural way. In fact to talk about camp is to betray it, thus I shall not talk about it more!
MET Gala 2019 looks like it will be flamboyant, shocking and definitely exciting!
by Pelin Atan
