What Is Camp? The Met Gala 2019 Theme, Explained
(Courtesy of New York Times)
In 1964, Susan Sontag defined camp as an aesthetic “sensibility” that is plain to see but hard for most of us to explain: an intentional over-the-top-ness, a slightly (or extremely) “off” quality, bad taste as a vehicle for good art.
“Notes on ‘Camp,’” her 58-point ur-listicle, builds on that inherent sense of something being “too much,” and also fences it in. Camp is artificial, passionate, serious, Sontag writes. Camp is Art Nouveau objects, Greta Garbo, Warner Brothers musicals and Mae West. It is not premeditated — except when it is extremely premeditated.
Her list of camp dos and don’ts has grown since it was first published. Some, including the filmmaker Bruce LaBruce, have updated and expanded it to include references as categorically specific as “Twilight” (bad straight camp) and Sarah Palin (conservative camp). Still, Sontag’s treatise remains the top-cited attempt to define a slippery concept.
The essay is also the founding document of this year’s Met Costume Institute exhibit and its attendant gala. On Monday, when Anna Wintour’s campers ascend the Met’s steps for a first look at “Camp: Notes on Fashion,” few of us will be among them. But that doesn’t mean we can’t camp on our own terms. What, among a random sampling of our exciting and tacky enthusiasms and passions, is — and what is not — camp?
Dog shows
Is it camp? Yes.
Dog shows began alongside county fair-type events: cow and poultry shows and the like. Today, they show no trace of the messier side of animal behavior. Perfect doggy specimens are pampered and fawned over like models, but tragically the dogs themselves never know exactly what’s going on, or realize how hot they are. Personalities and desires are projected wildly onto the furry celebrities by owners, announcers and spectators with pure and unbridled enthusiasm.
For every Westminster Dog Show brought to you by Purina Puppy Chow, there are thousands (more than 22,000, actually, according to the American Kennel Club) of smaller events happening across the country where you can find handlers trotting around bright green synthetic show rings wearing every shade of pastel suit jacket and A-line skirt you can imagine. It’s a world of caricatures, of fans who identify with a breed as strongly as a religion. The dog show ring is also the only place where one can win the covetable title of Select Bitch. EDEN WEINGART
Cher
Is it camp? Yes.
Cher was the picture of camp long before she discovered plastic surgery. Rhinestones, bugle beads and feathered headdresses — furnished by her partner in kitsch, Bob Mackie — helped build her outsize persona in the ’70s. Over time, Cher developed a reputation for humor and almost self-consciously terrible taste.
For every movie in which Cher wowed critics, there were half a dozen songs establishing her as the sultan of schlock. The one she’s most proud of is “Believe,” a trifle of pop music that sounds like Everything but the Girl’s “Missing” as reimagined by Nancy Meyers. But even Cher can’t take Cher seriously. “I’ve made millions of albums, and most of them are absolutely no good,” she told The New York Times in 2018. Of course, that’s what made them good. It wasn’t an accident that she became the first bona fide A-list diva to razzle-dazzle audiences for years at a time with residencies in Las Vegas. Or that a show of her life ultimately made its way to Broadway. Sontag asks, “When does travesty, impersonation, theatricality acquire the special flavor ofcamp?” The answer is: whenever Cher appears. JACOB BERNSTEIN
Donatella Versace
Is it camp? Yes.
She is hair (blonde), she is tan (tan), she is jewelry (gold), she is gloss, she is heels, heels, heels. She is Versace, both literally and proverbially, and yet she is so much Versace, so impossibly anything butVersace, that she is never called Versace. She is Donatella or, to her staff, DV. The Versace, like a radiant halo, announces itself.
If Donald Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich person, Donatella is a fashion victim’s idea of a fashion idol: everything skintight, everything bellissima, the jets, the parties, the famous friends, the Milan mansion, the gesticulating cigarette (she quit, but a cigarette, like a phantom limb, will always trail DV). This idea, which in lesser hands could be gaudy or merely glitzy, is sewn into each of her garments; once, at a private showroom appointment in Milan, a designer at Versace described to me in utter seriousness the “important shoulder” that distinguished a jacket.
Improbably, all of it works. Fashion critics, even the harrumphing ones, love her, love it. The people love her. Versace is one of the few places where they agree. She has the operatic grandeur of public tragedy (she took over Versace after the murder of her brother, Gianni) and personal struggles (the drugs, the rehab). And so she has been taken up, by drag queens and YouTubers, Penélope Cruz (who didn’t do her justice) and Maya Rudolph (who did). A benevolent queen, DV proved herself in on the joke and joined faux-Donatella onstage, shoulder to important shoulder. Bellissima. MATTHEW SCHNEIER
Kathie Lee Gifford
Is it camp? Daytime television camp
Morning show anchors are inherently campy, having dedicated their lives to sprucing up news — information that is by nature alarming or, on a good day, banal. Among such campers, Kathie Lee Gifford is a counselor. Her sentences are delivered as smoothly as if they were lines she memorized years ago for her starring role in a play about herself, a role she is perpetually reprising for one night only as a treat for fans. Take her final (ever) seconds on “Today.” “Am I supposed to say something?” she wondered. “Might as well!” said Hoda Kotb. In an instant, Ms. Gifford, champagne in hand, was delivering a voluminous bible quotation directly into the camera (Jeremiah 29) while, beneath her, a cartoon Kathie Lee toasted a credit reading “PROMOTIONAL CONSIDERATIONS FURNISHED BY CARNIVAL CRUISE LINE.” She closed the program by singing a composition written by herself. Cheers. CAITY WEAVER
Villanelle
Is it camp? Hot assassins are always campy.
From the instant Villanelle, the lightly self-mocking assassin of “Killing Eve” played by Jodie Comer, dispatches a Mafia don by plunging a hairpin into his eye, her predilection for theatrical extremes is plain. In fact, you can’t really miss it. After all, for Villanelle, murder is nothing more or less than a high-style form of playacting.
Watch with a mixture of horror and mirth as this wily assassin, dressed in a pervy variation on a milkmaid costume, eviscerates her victim in the window of a brothel. Could you be faulted for taking her performance as a brazen joke? Even Villanelle doesn’t seem to be taking it too seriously — her approach to the kill is so comically efficient, so artfully contrived, that it rises to the level of self-parody.
That archness extends to her wardrobe. Villanelle dresses for excess, effusively wicked in pink tulle or satin, a high-collar Edwardian shirt, or a regal negligee worn by day with gilded chandelier earrings. She represents the essence of extravagance, the hallmark of an aesthetic that Sontag likened to “a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers.” RUTH LA FERLA
John Waters
Is it camp? He is the king of camp.
No one channeled the joy of bad taste as efficiently as the director John Waters. His muse was Divine, a 6-foot-2 drag queen who, in the director’s self-described “trash trilogy” — “Pink Flamingos,” “Mondo Trasho” and “Female Trouble” — treated sexual assault, foot fetishism, coprophilia, incest, baby kidnappings and murder as big jokes. While Divine’s bouffants reached to the heavens, her outfits barely covered her crotch. She did not so much act as perform onscreen karaoke. Her gestures and facial expressions were almost as big as her appetite. Only rarely did Divine play characters who could easily be described as likable. But empathy was not Mr. Waters’s top objective. “If someone vomits watching one of my films, it’s like getting a standing ovation,” he wrote in the opening of his autobiography. JACOB BERNSTEIN
Russ Meyer
Is it camp? Thoroughly, albeit a straight-male subset.
Before there was John Waters, there was Russ Meyer. The grindhouse king of the 1960s made low-budget sexploitation films with titles like “Vixen!” and “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” that contained a Pride Parade float’s worth of campy costumes, not to mention campy dialogue by campy female characters whose over-the-top vampiness was so broad that they might as well have been played by Divine. Never mind that Mr. Meyer’s soft-core sex films were targeted to straight men looking for any opportunity to gaze at large, bare breasts in the days before pornography became widely accessible. Eventually, the dirty-raincoat crowd abandoned this auteur,known as King Leer, for more explicit, and boringly literal, films starring Linda Lovelace and Marilyn Chambers. Mr. Meyer’s legacy was left to those who could most appreciate him. John Waters said that “Pussycat!” was “possibly better than any film that will be made in the future.” If he was kidding, that makes it even more camp. ALEX WILLIAMS
Internet Astrology
Is it camp? It is artifice, but not camp.
If calamity defines this moment, internet astrology is a potent antidote. It’s a pseudoscience exaggerated with a wink through memes, an everything-in-quotation-marks lens for culture. Photos of Rihanna with a wine glass, Lady Gaga posing with her Golden Globe in a periwinkle Valentino gown, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nancy Pelosi with the cast of “Queer Eye” become a way of understanding — with questionable specificity — the habits of the signs. Do Leos “despise taking orders”? Are Geminis people who “aren’t easily offended by jokes”? Are Sagittariuses merely defined by the concept of “athleisure”? It doesn’t matter. In a world fated with no future (see: threats of authoritarianism, climate change and the impending artificial intelligence takeover), astrology’s assured predictions ease collective anxiety while allowing us to indulge in a shared identity, however absurd. LOVIA GYARKYE
Mae West
Is it camp? Per Sontag and us.
In 1933, Mae West cemented her status as Hollywood’s original queen of camp in the vaudeville-esque film “She Done Him Wrong.” The story takes place in a boozy saloon, where West’s character Lady Lou rules the roost, chewing up and spitting out every scoundrel who’s “warm for” her. Back then, female sexuality onscreen was largely synonymous with vulnerability. West changed that. She makes her cinematic entrance in a carriage, wearing a giant feathered hat and holding a parasol. Hands on hips, eyebrows raised, the term “woman” doesn’t begin to describe her; she’s a broad. Her dresses have almost as much sparkle as her jewelry. Her greatest distaste is seriousness. Not even a visit to a boyfriend in the clink rattles her. When one of her many suitors tells her that her life is in danger, Lou says, “You’re going to protect me? From what?” Then she adds: “When I need protection I’ll write you a letter.” JACOB BERNSTEIN
Supreme
Queen Elizabeth II
Is it camp? The British monarch is the most camp at Buckingham Palace.
The hair. The hats. The handbags. The extreme matchy-matchiness of it all. Queen Elizabeth II doesn't just rule over Britain and the Commonwealth — the world's longest-serving female head of state also does head-to-toe monochrome more thoroughly, and multi-dimensionally, than anyone else. She has inspired legions with her signature rainbow shades (the better to stand out in a crowd) and her favored off-duty tweed, silk scarf and pearl get-ups.
One of her more outspoken style admirers is Alessandro Michele, Gucci’s creative director and a co-chair of this year’s Met Gala, who in 2016 told The New Yorker: “The Queen is one of the most quirky people in the world. She is very inspiring. It is clear that she loves color.” Insofar as camp is about extravagance, her preference for unmissable outfits, along with the vast palaces, ornate state banquets, glittering horse-drawn carriages and decades of polished public performance, surely fits the bill. ELIZABETH PATON
Liberace
Is it camp? Yes.
If the center of American culture has historically been New York, Las Vegas is its capital of camp. It’s where Siegfried and Roy made magic macabre. It’s Cher’s spirit city, home this summer to yet another of her concert spectaculars. It was also once home to Liberace, the piano peacock known less for the music he made than for his $300,000, 16-foot, 175-pound sequined capes and giant bed underneath a $50,000 replica of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling. Liberace never had any doubt who he was. He is also remembered for his aphorisms, including: “Nakedness makes us Democratic, adornment makes us individuals.” “When the reviews are bad, I tell my staff they can join me as I cry all the way to the bank.” And, of course, “Don’t wear one ring, wear five or six. People ask how I can play with all those rings, and I say, very well, thank you.” JACOB BERNSTEIN
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