Met expo shines light on 'Camp' fashion

"The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers," wrote Susan Sontag (1933-2004), American writer and political activist, in her first major essay "Notes on 'Camp'" in 1964.

Fashion aficionados who have queued up outside the gallery at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially the Met, are guaranteed a close view of "three million feathers", in the form of a pink Cristobal Balenciaga gown from the Spanish fashion designer's autumn/winter 1965-66 collection.

With pink ostrich features sprouting all over the floor-reaching pink tulle dress with waist-cinching satin sash, the saccharine concoction provided a perfect footnote — this is perhaps not the intention of the designer — to Sontag's essay merely one year after its publication.

And more than half a century after Sontag's famous take on Camp, a cultural phenomenon that's admittedly beyond definition, Andrew Bolton, the head curator of the Met's Costume Institute, has mustered an equally courageous effort — a visual feast of an exhibition with a title that pays tribute to his witty muse Camp: Notes on Fashion.

As part of the show, the Balenciaga gown, intended for a socialite of his time, has joined a Dior evening dress of silk taffeta, a Thierry Mugler "Venus" ensemble and a Versace jumpsuit glistening with bead and crystal embroideries.

The unlikely juxtaposition of the supreme elegant (Balenciaga and Dior) with the vociferously subversive (Mugler and Versace) gives a hint to the dichotomy of camp, and what Sontag describes as "naïve camp" versus "deliberate camp".

"One must distinguish between naive and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naive. Camp which knows itself to be Camp ("camping") is usually less satisfying," Sontag wrote.

While the endeavor of Balenciaga to create the divine dress for a high-society lady has resulted in a piece of genuine, naïve camp, Mugler's deliciously over-the-top sartorial rendition of an open oyster shell, from which the female body would arise, constitutes calculated camp.

This is also to say that something that was not associated with Camp (the Balenciaga dress) at the time of its creation may be perceived as such later on, as the glamor and theatricality is viewed through the contemporary lens.

It's very true of Versailles, the royal residence of the French monarchs between 1682 and 1789, an era which Sontag believes marked the height of Camp. The gilded palace was built by Louis XIV (1638-1715), the Sun King who, as a great lover of excessiveness and exaggeration and a man of "flamboyant mannerism" — all Sontag benchmarks for Camp — has been given prime place in the first section of the exhibition, dealing mainly with the amorphous history of Camp.

On view is king's best-known portrait to date, executed by the French baroque painter Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659-1743).

While the sizable wig and the voluminous velvet cape all shouts Camp, equally unignorable are his white leather shoes, with square toes and scarlet soles. The shoes, as well as the pair of long legs extending from them, was a nod to the king's training in ballet, a stylized form of art that Sontag believes is saturated camp, just like opera.

"That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization," Sontag wrote.