Indefinable Sensibility; Camp

It has been few days since Met Ball and all the extravaganza, blasting us with all the Gucci outfits. But what the is the story behind the theme; Camp. An elite list of people aka Lady Gaga, Billy Porter, Ezra Miller, and many more… walked down the pink carpet of The Met. The exhibition itself – Camp: Notes on Fashion opened to the public at The Met this week.

“One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art,” Oscar Wilde

Bringing together four centuries of fashion and art, the show based Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay Notes on Camp to frame the ways designers have embraced camp’s tongue in cheek spirit. The concept of Camp came to our lives at a time of political and social anxiety, when society is polarised, like in the ‘60s. It challenges the social status.

A form of “deliberate” camp is that employed as a code among members of the LGBTQ+ community to communicate safely in order to avoid public persecution. Some of the corridors within the exhibition space were made deliberately narrow and claustrophobic to create “whisper corridors,” highlighting the “secret, clandestine origins of camp.”

Celebrates the meaning of liberty; it teaches how important it is to be free… Camp is a political message… And it is a testament to the fact that the LGBTQ+ community has been at the vanguard of camp long before its current definition was first detailed in the early 1900s.

Let all celebrate freedom and identity.