Alongside an ornate, shimmering outfit with seashell epaulettes designed by Rhodes – “you can say it’s over the top”, she says, “you can say it’s got a certain sense of humour” – are ones by designers including Mugler, Christian Lacroix, Giorgio Armani, Miuccia Prada, and Anna Sui. Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language. Being displayed at the Anna Wintour Costume Center, and linked with the glamorous Met Gala, however, the exhibition naturally emphasises fashion. In modern English, gay has come to be used as an adjective, and as a noun, referring to the community, practices and cultures associated with homosexuality.
Using the courts of 17th-Century France as a starting point (it has been suggested that the word ‘camp’ derives from se camper, meaning ‘to posture boldly’), the Met’s Camp: Notes on Fashion explores the trajectory of camp from the fringe towards popular culture in around 200 objects – outfits, sculptures, paintings, and drawings.
Or, as Cleto puts it: “It may be roughly described as a form both of performance and of perception celebrating theatricality and excess, improvising reality as a stage for outrageously ironic self-display and reinvention.” As Thierry Mugler – whose work is also in the exhibition – tells BBC Designed, camp is “freedom and fun mental health”. Sarah Prager, Queer, There, and Everywhere (2017): queer means anyone not totally straight or not totally cisgender. So what does ‘camp’ mean where Notes on Fashion is concerned? According to Rhodes, “it really means something that’s over the top in its concept, that wouldn’t go unnoticed and a sense of humour about it but it’s not mainstream, and it’s joyous and out of the ordinary …” And certainly the exhibition’s chief focus is on deliberate camp.