28 Nov

In light of the previous Met Gala 2019 which had a great and chalenging theme for its guests, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City held in September during the Fashion Week season an entire exposition dedicated to this fashion theme explaining its origins, historical course, present trends and meaning in fashion.

To end the suspense, as you probably have guessed, the topic addressed is ‘CAMP’.

What is ‘CAMP’ ? It is hard to have a very simple and clear definition of it, but to start briefly, ‘CAMP’ is an aesthetic style that regards something as being appealing because of its bad taste and ironic value.

When the usage appeared in 1909, it denoted “ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical” and by the middle of the 1970s, camp was defined as “banality, mediocrity, artifice, [and] ostentation … so extreme as to amuse or have a perversely sophisticated appeal”.The American writer Susan Sontag‘s essay “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964) emphasized its key elements as: “artifice, frivolity, naïve middle-class pretentiousness, and shocking excess”.Camp as an aesthetic has been popular from the 1960s to the present.

The exposition in Metropolitan Museum was very rich in exposed outfits, cultural related information and ‘voices’ of famous people in art and fashion giving personal explanations of what camp means.

Our best mix of everything would sum up to the following definition:

” Camp is trashy selective, camp is awful that goes extraordinary! Camp is the outrageous style, the extravagant playing for seriousness! Camp is cultural junk, history waste rediscovering its value! A woman walking around in 3 million feathers! Camp is failed seriousness! Camp is … Judy Garland …”

We hope you enjoy the universe of CAMP from Metropolitan Museum as much as its guests from Met Gala and the visitors in September did… and let yourself inspired by its eclecticism in your styling choices…It is certainly demanding and challenging in the same time.