Camp Is Not Just Fashion—It's Design, Too

Christopher Mason

Camp is suddenly all the rage.

As the topic of the Metropolitan Museum’s ingenious new exhibition at the Costume Institute, "Camp: Notes on Fashion"—a witty nod to Susan Sontag’s groundbreaking 1964 essay, “Notes on Camp”—the word still defies easy explanation. But the likelihood is that when you see it, camp will make you smile.

Beyond fashion, camp’s rich legacy in the decorative arts includes raised-eyebrow reevaluations of Art Nouveau to the Italian Radical Design Movement, with many guffaws—some intended, some not—in between.

Decorative objects made in earnest and rapturously received at the time of their creation—like a 19th-century Meissen porcelain clock adorned with cherubim and pansies—were perceived by some as preposterously gauche by the 1960s, making them eligible to be embraced as hilariously camp. New York antiquarian R. Louis Bofferding, observes, “Camp is a modern concept that evolved from people in the 1950s taking sophisticated positions on objects that were deemed amusing by intellectuals at the time.”

Derived from the French se camper (“to pose in an exaggerated fashion”), the word first appeared in print in 1907 in the Oxford English Dictionary, where it was described as “ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical; effeminate or homosexual.” But straightlaced Modernists dabbled in the movement too. In the early '30s, the eccentric French-born interior designer Carlos de Beistegui, commissioned Le Corbusier to design a penthouse on the Champs-Élysées, where they installed an 18th-century commode, a formal fireplace, and Venetian grotto chairs. “It was provocative and postmodern before the term existed,” says Philippe Garner, the former Christie’s decorative arts expert. It was also playfully camp. “That ironical probing is central to the spirit of Camp,” he adds.

Quoted in The New York Times, Andrew Bolton, the perennially cheerful and tongue-in-chief British curator who conceived the Met exhibition, says we are in the midst of a golden age of camp: “Whether it’s pop camp, queer camp, high camp, or political camp—Trump is a very camp figure—I think it’s very timely.”

The question remains: How long will it take for camp itself to dwindle into cultural insignificance and ignominy, only to be welcomed back, perhaps in the next another millennium, as the dernier cri of chic amusement? For the moment, however, AD PRO looks back at design's most flamboyant moments to prove that camp is in the wink of the beholder.

Camp Is Not Just Fashion—It's Design, Too

A bold response to the aristocratic 19th-century fashion for designing entire rooms to resemble grottoes, Venetian grotto furniture like these outlandish crustaceans were prized as fashionably camp curiosities when Syrie Maugham and other tastemakers began deploying them in the 1920s.
This horological bonbon, crafted in the relentlessly cheerful Rococo style with posies of bright flowers, goes to town with its allegorical themes. It is crowned by Summer, which is coiffed with grapes and vine leaves, brandishing a brimming goblet of wine. Such precious detail could not be cherished for long; it fell from favor until embraced as irresistible camp a century later.
A witty response to Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic movement, which flourished in 1880s London, and to the sinuous flourishes of Art Nouveau, this dandified dispenser was flagrantly over-the-top even before the Oxford English Dictionary defined camp for the first time in print in 1907 as “ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical; effeminate or homosexual.” Looking at it with a straight face remains a challenge.
Designed in an African-inflected Art Nouveau style with a circular seat festooned with dense, tufted tassels and asymmetrical mini totems, this exuberant assemblage could serve as a throne for a fashionable prince. Perceived as as risibly tacky in the 1960s, Bugatti-designed throne chairs are now a sought-after item at auction.
Created in earnest and considered the apogee of sophisticated good taste at the time, such overwrought objects elicited howls of laughter from Manhattan sophisticates in 1964, when Susan Sontag designated Tiffany lamps as camp. Today they are prized collectors’ items.
Known for the idealized glamor of his Art Deco figurines, Chiparus’s works were exquisitely crafted and coveted, like this intricately detailed bronze of the Queen of the Nile. By 1960s such overwrought confections inspired shrieks of mirth from Manhattanite sophisticates, who deemed them in deliciously egregious bad taste.
An outré homage to Tinseltown's tongue-in-cheek temptress, these playful Surrealist couches were designed to shock and amuse. Here, they are shown in situ at Monkton, the former home of Edward James. Now in the V&A Museum, they are deemed an iconic piece of 20th-century furniture.
An ebullient retort to the “good taste” of midcentury minimalism, Memphis’s madcap funhouse aesthetic derived from a creative process that its Italian founder Ettore Sottsass called “radical, funny, and outrageous.” Rejected as preposterous in the aughts, Memphis is back in fashion as a collectable iteration of enduring camp. Shown here is Karl Lagerfeld's apartment in Monte Carlo, which includes Memphis icons like the Sottsass-designed "Carlton" room divider and Masanori Umeda's "Tawaraya" boxing ring-shaped seating.
In the late 1970s and throughout the '80s, well-known architects like Venturi and Michael Graves eschewed lean modernism, preferring to “quote” Neoclassical motifs and creating an exuberant historical pastiche style. Their camp retort to Mies van der Rohe’s dictum that “Less is more” was “Less is a bore.”
Philip Johnson's iconic “Chippendale” topped AT&T headquarters, now known as 550 Madison, heralded the ascendance of postmodern architecture with cheeky historical pastiche. Pictured here is the Pritzker Prize–winning architect with a model of the New York skyscraper in May 1978.
German artist and Stiletto Studios founder Frank Schreiner designed this “armchair” in 1983. A playfully satirical swipe at 1980s consumerism, with chromed metal wires evoking a shopping cart, it was clearly not designed for comfort.