Setting Up Camp

On the heels of this year’s MET Gala, columnist Phyllida Jay explores the meaning of the Camp aesthetic and its biggest exponents in India

- Phyllida Jay

The theme of this year’s Metropolitan Museum of Art [MET] Gala, an annual spectacle of fashion and celebrity was Camp. Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp (1964) was the basis for the exhibition, and Instagram buzzed with excerpts from the text. Sontag emphasised Camp’s critical elements as “failed seriousness” and “outrageous aestheticism”. Of paramount importance is that Camp highlights the difference between artifice and nature.

The MET exhibition itself called Camp: Notes on Fashion, includes a photo of the Victorian “Fanny and Stella”, notorious for their cross-dressing, and who referred to their dressing up in women’s garb as “camping”. Author Christopher Isherwood, who chronicled the gay, counter cultural scene in 1930s Berlin, frequently referred to Camp. Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich became sex symbols as well as gay Camp icons due to the way they played with gender expectations; they often ostentatiously donned men’s suits.