NOTES ON FASHION and Intertextuality
Sontag’s essay was dedicated to Oscar Wilde, who was the one who turned camp into a noun, a person. In an interview for BBC Designed, Fabio Cleto, a co-author of the exhibition’s accompanying book, says: “fully articulated camp emerged in the late 19th Century, and in the queer-star Image of Oscar Wilde.
It was Wilde’s stigmatised body whose trials for ‘gross indecency’ in 1895 typified the ‘homosexual’, which provided a grammar of camp as a twisted form of aestheticism that largely (if indirectly) meant sexual deviance”. Wilde was also considered dandy, meaning a man who is refined and too into his looks. As he once said: “I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best”. In Sontag’s essay, Dapper Dan says: "Camp is dandyism in the age of mass culture".
In the following video, the curator Andrew Bolton comments on the exhibition as a whole and all aspects considered.
The dresses designed for the guests who attended the Met Gala were filled with intertextuality and references to camp culture. Danai Gurira’s dress, designed by Gabriela Hearst, used Oscar Wilde as a reference. In this photo, Gurira is in the exhibition, by Wilde’s painting.