written by:
lUÍSA VIEGAS
IT is hard to name an event that receives as much visibility as the Met Gala. It is considered by many the ‘Oscars of Fashion’. It is already a huge event on its own, but considering the fashion scenario, it becomes even bigger, as it receives more visibility than fashion shows usually do. All the designers around the world focus their attention on creating masterpieces for celebrities who attend the event, it is Haute Couture to the core.
The gala happens in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Met, in New York City. It is a charity event, to raise money for the Met's Costume Institute. The theme of each event comes from the current exhibition in the Costume Institute, and the Gala is the grand opening of the latest exhibition. The previous Met Galas held the most various themes. Some of the latest ones were: Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination (2018), Manus x Machina (2016), Punk: Chaos to Couture (2013). This year's exhibition theme is Camp: Notes On Fashion. It gave some guests a little trouble to understand it. As the exhibition tells us, camp has a different definition for each person: “Come to the exhibition and define it for yourself”.
It may be broad and subjective, but camp holds some important meanings. As the exhibition shows, the word first appeared as a verb in the era of Louis XIV in the court of Versailles, at that time “meaning a certain theatricality, impersonation and masquerade”. This definition changed over the years. In Victorian England, for example, camp was an adjective associated with queer subculture and cross-dressing.
The modern camp concept was solidified by the American critic Susan Sontag in the essay “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964), which inspired the exhibition. According to the curator Andrew Bolton, she traced the main characteristics of camp: “irony, humor, parody, theatricalization, excess, extravagance, exaggeration”.
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