Gear Up for the Met Gala With a Sneak Peek of the “Camp: Notes on Fashion” Catalog With Photographs by Johnny Dufort

Gear Up for the Met Gala With a Sneak Peek of the “Camp: Notes on Fashion” Catalog With Photographs by Johnny Dufort

Camp, the subject around which the upcoming Gucci-sponsored blow-out exhibition at the Met is organized, is something that is as sticky as it is eely. Once you start thinking about it, “You end up seeing camp everywhere!” admitted Andrew Bolton, Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute, in conversation with Hamish Bowles.

With an arched brow and a healthy sense of irony, camp closes the distance between high and popular culture, and, as Susan Sontag wrote in “Notes on ‘Camp,’” it “turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment.” The upcoming exhibition, Bolton has noted, “effectively illustrat[es]” Sontag’s seminal essay, a collection of 58 points on a pervasive “sensibility.” Camp assumes a certain elitism (“Detachment is the prerogative of an elite,” writes Sontag), and, akin to the fashion industry, values artifice, style, exaggeration, and glamour.

Featuring about 200 objects, both fine art and fashion, “Camp: Notes on Fashion” will trace the origins of the subject from the 17th century, specifically the court of Versailles, to the present day, when disruption and duplicity are the common currency. Sontag’s line, “Camp sees everything in quotation marks,” might bring to mind certain tweets; the cringey two-handed, double-fingered “quote” gesture; or—more happily—Off-White’s cheeky “For Walking” boots.

Though the grand gesture is expressive of camp, as are overt expressions of self and style, it also can operate as a code in small or marginalized communities; a section of the show will trace camp’s origins to the queer subcultures of Europe and America.

Knowingness, or being in on the joke, is a characteristic of camp, but so is a sense of fun. A sneak peek at the photographs in the exhibition’s accompanying catalog reveal not flamboyance, but playfulness. They were taken by man-of-the-moment Johnny Dufort, who, Mark Holgate has noted, is “unafraid to get silly—and a little sick—in his humor.” Here, he’s played it fairly straight and let the clothes do the talking. “Johnny is a master of pose, and since camp is all about posing, he was the ideal choice,” states Bolton. “He also has a very subtle and understated style, which was important. I didn’t want the images to scream ‘camp.’” Which might explain why the mannequin’s lips are s(qu)ealed.