Word of the Week: 'Camp'

The Met Gala is a sort of pop-up zoo of rich Upper East Siders who want to feel public-spirited about showing off. This occurs because rich people get bored, and bored people do weird stuff. Regular nerds do cosplay and go to conventions, the hyper-rich … also do that.

Twitter and other social media observers had a field day with this year’s, because host Anna Wintour made the theme “camp” as inspired by Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on Camp.” Now, not everyone gay is an aesthete and not every gay aesthete has a foppish sensibility, but the frisson and therefore the fun of the theme was very clearly that gays have a certain hold on camp and a certain authority over its limits.