The difference between perfecting camp and falling into kitsch is daring to truly be over the top. And for the Met Gala, the fundraiser that kicks off the opening of each year’s new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, the red carpet truly captured the theme “Camp: Notes on Fashion.”
Katy Perry came dressed as a glittering chandelier which, to the internet’s delight, actually lit up. Lady Gaga had not one but four outfits to model for the waiting cameras. Janelle Monáe’s dress featured an eye that actually moved and blinked. RuPaul donned a florescent pink sequined suit with a plume of feathers running up his sleeve ending in a zebra head on his shoulder. Billy Porter came riding in on a litter born by six shirtless men, only to parade up the steps in a golden cat suit with outstretched golden wings.
There were feathers, bling, and everything in between — the more lavish and bizarre, the better. How could there not be? As Susan Sontag put it, one of the many definitions she offers in “Notes on Camp”: “When something is just bad (rather than Camp), it’s often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn’t attempted to do anything really outlandish.”
But Sontag’s definitive exploration of camp was more than an appreciation of daring. Camp was also a critique — a mocking and decidedly outsider protest against society and its expectations.
In that sense, perhaps putting camp on the Met Gala red carpet and splashing it across headlines and social media isn’t quite in keeping with the genre’s “tradition” and its culture-in-quotation-marks aesthetic. After all, if camp is literally behind glass on display at one of the nation’s premier museums, something of “its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration,” to borrow Sontag’s words, seems lost.
But camp, defined by outlandishness, can never become “mainstream.” The moment Lady Gaga-style costume changes or light-up chandelier dresses go on sale at Target, they won’t be camp, but merely a bad imitation.
