What does it mean to be camp?
BBCWhat does it mean to be camp? “Ladies would have said that about Oscar Wilde at one time.” Getty Images Billy Porter makes an extravagant entrance at the Met Gala, encapsulating the spirit of camp Likewise, Fabio Cleto, a co-author of the exhibition’s accompanying book, says that, “fully articulated camp emerged in the late 19th Century, and in the queer-star image of Oscar Wilde. It was Wilde’s stigmatised body,” he tells BBC Designed, “whose trials for ‘gross indecency’ in 1895 typified the ‘homosexual’, which provided a grammar of camp as a twisted form of aestheticism that largely meant sexual deviance.” Camp which knows itself to be Camp is usually less satisfying – Susan Sontag Yet camp, to Sontag, transcended homosexual mannerisms. Alan Edwards, the former UK publicist of David Bowie – whose early career has often been associated with camp – says that, prior to hearing about the Met show, the term recalled for him “the British films of the 1950s, especially all those Carry On films and where TV comedians went back to traditional ‘music hall’, where there were a lot of men dressing up as women.” Metropolitan Museum of Art/ Johnny Dufort Ensemble by Alessandro Michele for Gucci – artifice and exaggeration are at the heart of camp How, then is camp ultimately to be regarded? “Does it just mean exotic fashion?” Unfortunately, as Cleto explains, there’s no straightforward answer: “Being elusive, unstable, and elitist, camp cannot be framed into a sentence or into a definition.” Metropolitan Museum of Art/ Johnny Dufort A dress by Rossella Jardini from the Moschino spring/summer 1998 collection And, while many of the designers taking part in the exhibition might share Rhodes’ view that camp as the theme of an exhibition is but a “thin thread”, its abstruseness, from a curatorial standpoint, can actually be seen as a strength; for if few can agree on what camp is, few can also agree on what it isn’t.
History of this topic
Camp: Notes on Fashion review - A much needed celebration of profoundly queer, profoundly political aesthetic
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Inside the Met Gala: Feathers, bling and ideas about ‘camp’
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Met Gala 2019: Kate Moss dazzles in a perilously low-cut sequinned dress
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Andrew Bolton discusses what to expect from the camp-themed Met Gala
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The 2019 Met Gala Is All About Camp. Here's What That Means.
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How ‘camp’ went from the margins to mainstream
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