Camp: Notes on Fashion - This year's Met Gala Theme Explained!
Lady Gaga wearing Marc Jacobs! Channelling Camp
If last year's theme 'Heavenly Bodies: Fashion & Catholic Imagination' got people's tongues wagging, this year's theme - 'Camp: Notes On Fashion' got the glitterati scratching their heads. So what is Camp Fashion? Even I got confused and started my research about the topic. What I came across is that its basically inspired from the Susan Sontag's essay ' Notes on Camp' published in 1964 in the Partisan review. The essay made Sontag famous overnight. It was something which nobody had talked about before or maybe haven't explained it the way it should have been. "Many things in the world have not been named; even if they have been named, have never been described" she wrote. The essence of Camp is in the love of unnatural - something weird, exaggerated, artifice and over the top.
Susan Sontag
One of the subjects of Camp was a particular flavour of homosexuality. The drag, the liberal attitude and celebrating the forbidden. The perfect example of Camp is the 1962 American physiological thriller-horror 'Whatever Happened to Baby Jane' starring Betty White & Joan Crawford. If you're someone who enjoys old, vintage Hollywood movies you know exactly what I mean. The movie is an epitome of exaggeration and artifice.
Betty White & Joan Crawford in 'Whatever happened to Baby Jane'
Sontag was an activist of social justice. She decided to talk about an issue, which nobody wanted to talk about, even though it was right there in front of us. What explains Camp fashion crystal clear is Rupal's Drag Race.
Its right there in our everyday lives. Camp is ironic yet sincere, glamorous yet tacky, so bad its good, too much and just right! It's Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper playing up their on-screen melodrama on the Oscar stage, its the initial years of Lady Gaga dressing-up, in her real life. It's as Sontag herself explained, "a woman walking around in a dress made of 3 million feathers." Nothing is less and nothing is more is what Camp is all about.
Its about stepping outside the boundaries of what society typically expects.
The roots of Camp can be traced back to 17th century France where Louis XIV built his court of artifice, opulence and grandeur. In that dramatic palace people donned layered, disfiguring clothes, hats, voluminous and towered wigs. In Victorian England the word 'Camp' was used as a coded language for homosexuality and even Oscar Wild mentioned it in one of his writings. In later years old Hollywood of 1930's normalised and started celebrating the exaggeration of fashion. Camp vanishes the thin line between genders and has an experimental attitude towards gender and individuality. If you look at the recent years, designers have focused more on Camp fashion because the 'express yourself' movement has found more meaning and relevance in today's times. 'Camp is liberal & empowering.'
Enough information about CAMP! Lets see, which of our stars would do the justice with this complicated theme this Monday! Met Gala, I am waiting for you desperately. Here is a brief video explaining CAMP fashion.
Few Pictures below will give you an idea about the dramatic CAMP Fashion.
Comments
Post a Comment