And so, the annual
fundraiser fashion parade that is the
Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) Gala chose as its theme
Camp: Notes on Fashion this year?! This deserves closer examination, methinks...
Is a cynical attempt by anodyne individuals to appear "over-the-top" really camp? Is a parade of privileged people wearing unaffordable-to-the-masses designer-label clothing really camp?
Some of the outfits certainly fitted the bill of "inversion of taste", to which Miss Susan Sontag referred in her
Notes on Camp [which was the "set text" for the Gala's participants] - Michael Urie's 1920s-style half-and-half drag pastiche being one such example:
...as was Janelle Monae's surrealist number:
However this "inversion" - as argued by Katrin Horn in her book
Women, Camp, and Popular Culture: Serious Excess - was historically conducted with a more meaningful intent:
"At its core, camp is defined as a parodic device that uses irony, exaggeration, theatricality, incongruity and humour to question the pretext's status as 'original' or 'natural'...[it is] the inversion of taste in favour of the neglected, the other, the marginalised. From this playful shift in aesthetic judgements camp derives its broader potential 'as a way of making cultural, social and sexual critique under the guise of harmless humour'...the inversion of insider and outsider by way of recoding 'who's in on the joke'."
So was there actually a "joke" to be "in on" demonstrated at the Met?
I suppose one could point to theatre owner Jordan Roth arriving on the catwalk as...a theatre:
...or "gangsta-rapper" Cardi B - who made her name with records about deprived urban street life and gang fights - wearing a frock that apparently took more than 2,000 hours to create and needed a team of five men to lift the train:
It would appear, however, that it was another of Ms Sontag's definitions of camp -
“the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience” - which proved the most widely popular of themes, as ably demonstrated by Mr Billy Porter:
...and RuPaul:
One of the main tenets, however, that truly "defines" camp - if any such "definition" were so readily agreed upon - is irony. Thus, in its truest sense, if anything summed up the most camp occurrence of the entire occasion it was
not Gaga showing-off with a triple-layer frock and an entourage of performers, it was
not rich heterosexual males thinking they could get away with looking a "bit sissy" for an evening, nor was it the cavalcade of voluptuous and vacuous starlets squeezing themselves into lurid-yet-flattering frou-frou gowns.
No! The campest moment was Dame Joan Collins, turning up
as herself portraying her most famous [and ultimately most camp] on-screen character Alexis Morell Carrington Colby Dexter Rowan...
Now
that, laydeez'n'genlmen, is how it is done.
