The camp aesthetic has become something more and more popular in fashion over the last years. Many years back, describing something as “campy” had a rather negative connotation, whereas today it gets all types of reactions. These days camp is so popular that it was even the theme of the 2019 Met Gala. The Costume Institute Gala was inspired by Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay called Notes on Camp. In it, the author makes 58 points detailing the ways in which the concept of camp can be seen. The essay can be condensed to the sentence of “Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration . . . style at the expense of content . . .” Andrew Bolton, Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of the Costume Institute said that camp embraces elements such as “irony, humor, parody, pastiche, artifice, theatricality, excess, extravagance, nostalgia, and exaggeration”. He also added that the theme is timely, and “very relevant to the cultural conversation to look at what is often dismissed as empty frivolity but can be actually a very sophisticated and powerful political tool”.
Bolton’s remark is a true one, camp is something relevant to our culture today but there are a few things that need be added in order to get the whole picture. While sometimes mocking things or doing things upside down can be useful in order to understand things or to release tension, establishing this approach as a norm, as it happens in today’s society can be detrimental. It in this sense, it can be said that embracing camp as a philosophy and a continuous approach to things, high goals cannot be achieved. “Style at the expense of content” will in the long run leave you with an empty shell and we see a lot of that happening today, as people focus very much on structure, but not on content, which leaves the world emptied out of meaning. Moreover, focusing too much on the mundane and falling into nostalgia will also take out the eternal out of the question.
Surely, camp has its purpose and can be used sometimes, but an over-campy approach can lead to an upside down world, where the trivial takes the spotlight.
Fraquoh and Franchomme
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