For the celebrities in attendance, the Gala was not an expression of pleasure or irreverence but an opportunity to offer proofs of piety, a demonstration of appropriate and studied attention.
Public reactions to the 2019 Met Gala, “Camp: Notes on Fashion,” coalesced around two main complaints: first, celebrities don’t understand camp, and second, the looks on display at fashion’s supposed “biggest night” were decidedly and overwhelmingly mid. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s annual fundraiser for the Costume Institute took both its theme and its title from Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay, “Notes on Camp,” where Sontag attempts both a definition and a taxonomy of the notoriously slippery term. She offers a definition of what camp is only by gesturing towards where it can be found: in the public personas of Jayne Mansfield and Bette Davis, Flash Gordon comics, the ballet Swan Lake, and Tiffany Lamps. And yet, Sontag writes, “intending to be campy is always harmful…camp rests on innocence…but also, when it can, corrupts it.” That is to say: the camp object cannot strive for this moniker; however, once achieved the thing itself is imbued with the covert and pleasurable sheen of camp. Camp is knowing and ironic solidarity in the face of social alienation, a transgressive affinity towards the “fugitive sensibility” of bad taste. No surprise then, that the attempt to fashion the slippery term by both Vogue Magazine and The Met produced such underwhelming results.
There is perhaps no better representative of camp’s sensibilities than John Waters, filmmaker and preeminent King of Camp (just one of his many monikers, including but not limited to Prince of Puke and Pope of Trash). His irreverent oeuvre articulates camp’s ties to the transgressive, “cult” status of its artifacts. As opposed to other, adjacent categories (kitsch, for example), the camp object is marked by an almost guileless corruption, a simultaneously flagrant and accidental affinity for both disgust and glamor. For Waters, the viewer’s revolting body testifies to camp’s essential un-assimilability, writing that “if someone vomits watching one of my films, it’s like getting a standing ovation.” I read this affinity for vomit not as a pleasure in pain but as evidence of camp’s involuntary and un-replicable hold over the viewer: if camp is defined by its too-muchness or corrupted innocence, then the act of vomiting is the literal expulsion of this disquieting excess. By defining puke as ovation, Waters points to something about camp that cannot be strived towards, a transgression or vulgarity that cannot be approximated via earnest effort. With Waters’ helpful intervention, we might add to Sontag’s catalog of camp objects: the green projectile vomit in The Exorcist, Laura Dern’s abandoned (very clearly prop) vomit in Wild at Heart, the totality of Divine’s delightful and disgusting tenure as Waters’ muse.
The camp aesthetic that Vogue no doubt aimed to capture was certainly one of excess, but without the disgust. Of course, camp survives without disgust and becomes something like winking glamor (we might think of figures like Mansfield and Davis.) The covert pleasure in adopting such figures as camp icons rests, both at the Gala and elsewhere, in the perceived excesses of their performances of femininity, what Angelica Jade Bastién describes as the “scenery-chewing performances that make the labor of acting visible” usually restricted to men. Rachel Syme’s article about the 2019 Gala argues that the theme was always doomed to fail, that “in naming the Met Gala theme as camp this year, the hosts risked stamping out any accidental campiness, or at least the kind that comes from making glamorous mistakes.” Mirroring Sontag’s essay, the “mid” performances at the Gala offer us a counter-archive: instances where camp cannot be found. These performances seem to lack both the disgust and the glamorous flagrancy of camp’s most iconic instances. Even that which may initially masquerade as camp – as with Lady Gaga’s four part entrance or Cardi B’s spectacular skirt – work more effectively as indexes of status than of Waters’ uncontainable excess. An astute fashion blogger noted that the staircase spanning skirt in both of these ensembles was not a representation of camp so much as an assertion of A-list status following Rihanna’s famous 55-pound dress with its 16 foot train at 2015’s “China: Through the Looking Glass.” If camp is characterized by transgression, the creep of “mid” is not necessarily the corruption of the category (camp is, after all, itself corrupting) but the way this essential “fugitive sensibility,” per Sontag, is all-too-neatly folded into “good taste.” While camp arrives as glamorous in its unintended or accidental too-muchness, at the Gala, it is transformed into the striving, effortful attempt to disclose, to capture. The Gala gave us looks: serviceable and recognizable gestures towards camp that, for all their resemblance to the real thing, missed the mark.
For the celebrities in attendance, the Gala was not an expression of pleasure or irreverence but an opportunity to offer proofs of piety, a demonstration of appropriate and studied attention. In October of 2018, a full 6 months before the event, Harry Styles (one of the co-chairs of the 2019 Gala) was photographed in LA carrying a copy of Against Interpretation, the collection of essays in which “Notes on Camp” is published (Harry, for all his study, defined camp as “about enjoyment and fun”). For those of us who watched in real time as celebrities and socialites took to the Gala’s pink carpet, the Vogue correspondent’s questions – “what does camp mean to you” or “how would you define camp” – crystalized the grasping and ultimately unfulfilled promise of the event’s theme. Vogue went so far as to publish an article two days later offering “20 notes on camp” derived from the night’s looks, including definitions such as “Camp is running away with the circus” or “Camp is rainbows.” These aphoristic descriptions flatten their subject; they evacuate camp of its transgressive and queer histories even as such histories are dutifully alluded to in both the circus or the rainbow. Mid indeed.
There was something particularly normative about the Gala’s reduction of camp to an obligatory nod or studious representation–a normativity that is distinctly related to the Gala’s mid aesthetics. As an event that prizes wealth and celebrity above all else, the mid-ness of the event comes, in large part, from the fact that its attendees were overwhelmingly hetero, cis, and white. While participants approximated camp’s opulence, they retained a critical and material distance from the “bad taste” of its uglier, messier, more queer performances. For instance, Nick Jonas defined camp as “not taking yourself too seriously, having some fun with it,” which, for him, amounts to spending time with Priyanka Chopra, his wife, looking outrageous. Camp slips, in the span of his interview, domestic quietude, the “outrageous” performance subsumed within their cis-het date night. Model Karlie Kloss, perhaps the most derided of the evening’s attendees, posted an image of her face reflected in a compact prior to the event with the caption “looking camp right in the eye,” only to arrive hours later in a simple gold mini dress. In a video released on her personal YouTube channel the day after the event Kloss chronicles the creation of her look, telling designer Dapper Dan that she wanted to be “on theme, but in our way…and I wanna look hot.” Actor and writer Lena Waithe attempted a more overt definition with her suit, which read “Black drag queens invented camp” across the back panel, but even this well-meaning (and in many ways necessary given the overwhelmingly white, cis, het guest list) attempt to re-introduce camp’s essential queerness and Blackness into the evening feels reverential rather than camp in and of itself, a taxonomical and dutiful nod, once again, to the attempt at defining camp.
Critics distinguished the pious from the non-believer by deeming a design “on-theme” or “off-theme” – mocking attendees for failing to provide the correct definition in their dress or in their interviews. Of course, these interventions work as their own form of avowal, where critics reproduce the attempt at clear, cogent definition. It is because of this sweaty sincerity that the offerings on display at the 2019 Met Gala were decidedly “mid.” I am curious about what fidelity the attendees were attempting to perform in repeatedly attesting to their own understanding of the theme. It seems to me that “Camp: Notes on Fashion” was an opportunity and even a provocation towards the arbiters of high culture to engage in the knowing vulgarity of the low. Instead, approaching camp as a treatise rather than a sensibility of delight and offense, the Gala prescribed a sense of legitimacy to the term, and in so doing robbed it of its absurdity and its innocence. The reverence with which celebrity and spectator approach the annual Gala is at odds with the fundamentally and foundationally queer and irreverent sensibilities of camp. Images from this event gesture towards camp, but mildly, politely, demurely. They do not transgress so much as they flatter. In transforming what was and is a performance of hyperbole and the grotesque, this mid-ification of camp asserts both a seriousness and an appropriateness to the aesthetic by refiguring it as a passing, entertaining mask. Camp itself is diverted and instead figured as wholly compatible with the normative performances of gender, wealth, and celebrity on display. The night tells on itself in the decision not to invite Waters – when asked why he thought he was not included, he asked: “Well, do you think Anna Wintour is that funny?”
Of course, the event was not without its successes. I’ll end, as I wish I always could, with Celine Dion, offering the only true “camp” moment of the night: “It’s like, you know at first I was a little bit confused when I heard camp, I wasn’t sure what it meant, I thought like, camping, we’re going camping, we’re going to be at the Met and everybody’s going to stay and sleep all night together. But, uh, no.”
Martha Henzy is a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan where she researches violence and witness in contemporary literature and visual culture. At all times, she aspires to embody Billy Crystal singing “Surrey with the Fringe on Top.”