"Camp" is the explosion of exaggerated shapes, playfully ironic concepts, and the larger-than-life fashion moments that will be swarming the Met Gala stairs tonight in New York. Here are nine collections from 2019 that will paint the picture of this year's Met Gala theme, which is based off Susan Sontag's 1964 essay Notes on Camp.
"The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious."
"So many of the objects prized by Camp are old-fashioned, out-of-date, demondé... What was banal can, with passage of time become fantastic."
"Camp art is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content."
"The androgyne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility."
"Again, Camp is the attempt to do something extraordinary. But extraordinary in the sense, often, of being special, glamorous."
"Camp is the triumph of the epicene style. (The convertibility of 'man' and 'woman,' 'person' and 'thing.')"
"Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is 'too much.'"
"Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style... It is the love of the exaggerated, the 'off,' of things-being-what-they-are-not."
"Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers."
Photos via Imaxtree