If you’re looking forward to seeing an exhibition based on this year’s Metropolitan Museum of Art Met Gala, “Camp: Notes on Fashion,” you’ll be disappointed when you do.
In its aesthetics and practice, camp disregards elite standards and instead ostentatiously leans toward excess and decadence, while also appropriating middle class appeal. The word “camp” is derived from the French term, “se camper,” which means, “to pose in an exaggerated manner.” Its definition has remained fluid and is best described by those who embody it.
The later baroque and garish flamboyance of Marie Antoinette’s Versailles embodied camp, as does President Trump’s penthouse apartment in Trump Tower, which was inspired by the French palace. Oscar Wilde’s irreverent fiction and fashion also exemplified camp. The author was an unlikely precursor to vaudeville and also to Mae West, a camp icon. The actress, who continually encountered censorship as Wilde did, told Playboy later in her life, “camp is the kinda comedy where they imitate me.”
The Met secured several contemporary camp icons. Designs by Jeremy Scott, a farm kid from Missouri who became the internationally renowned Moschino boss, is heavily featured. His designs turn McDonald’s and Budweiser into haute couture. Similarly enthralling are the unapologetically brash branding of Gucci and the sexual sophistication of Dolce & Gabbana.
But except for a few pieces by Balenciaga and John Galliano, the rest of the exhibit isn’t just an embarrassing misread of camp but a complete erasure of women from the history of camp.
Straight men have been a minority in the fashion industry for centuries, so it’s no wonder that gay men occupy a significant subsection of the history of camp. But the Met’s exhibition simply writes women’s defiance and dictation of camp out of existence until you get to the last two rooms. Men are allowed to appropriate women’s fashion: an Yves Saint Laurent rendition of one of Wilde’s outfits is paired with women’s heels, and a Gucci smoking jacket modeled by a supposed Wilde mannequin is evidently styled for a woman. Meanwhile, Judy Garland’s “Over the Rainbow” reverberates against baby pink walls.
No mention is made of Marilyn Monroe or her camp successors Madonna and Anna Nicole Smith, nor are Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein’s pin-up babes, who exemplified camp’s peak moment midcentury. Instead, we jump from the decadence of fake Gucci Warhol clothes and unpersuasive erotica to Vivienne Westwood bodysuits that our betters wouldn’t dream of letting us normal people wear.
If you wish to gripe to Anna Wintour about it, it’s about $30,000 for a ticket to the gala. If you just want to hang around the Sackler wing of the museum to complain, it’s $25. The Met recently raised prices; the $200 million aggregated from the gala annually presumably just isn’t enough.
—By Tiana Lowe
