The category for next year’s Met Gala is… CAMP. I gasped, theatrically, with joy when I read this news, despite having been NFI for the past three years and indeed ever, and despite my only interaction with this annual fashion party being a feverish bitchiness the next morning scrolling bitterly through Instagram. I am, however, very good at fashion parties, please note this, Anna Wintour. I’m very complimentary of other people’s shoes and happy to eat most canapés. Once, when I was aged approximately 21 and slightly high on mini burgers and free cocktails, I shot flirty smiles to a handsome guy on the other side of the party for hours before realising he was a catwalk model projected on the wall. My eternal catchphrase: “Dignity, dignity, dignity.”
2019’s Met Gala theme, which relishes ironic irreverence, has a particular resonance today, when international politics appear to be hurtling as one into the toilet from Trainspotting, and when it’s not just the guy with a sandwich board outside Topshop promising the end is nigh. In 1964, Susan Sontag was the first to write seriously about the meaning of camp. “The essence of camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” Camp embraces dissent. Like a kitten with a mouse, it plays with serious things until they become “dethroned”. And, today, it can be found everywhere, from the obvious places, like smash TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race, to the more surprising, like Ikea, where I stood for some time last week in front of one of its new 80s-influenced floral Ektorp sofas, performing a thinking pose. Not only has Ikea brought back the chintz it once urged Britain to “chuck out”, but it has collaborated with a ceramics artist on the funky Foremal collection, which it describes as: “Pretty. Ugly. Lovely.” Ikea is embracing bad taste, and so, camp.
But for most of us, the word is most commonly used to mean “obviously gay” – a man that isn’t performing masculinity in an approved way. I’m reading Quentin Crisp’s autobiography, The Naked Civil Servant, at the moment, and there it is on the first page – in the 1930s he describes himself as a “self-evident” homosexual. He wore make-up – he took violent risks. “Camp is esoteric,” Sontag continued, “something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.” It’s because of this that the mainstreaming of camp bothers me, just a little.
Camp culture, once a refuge for people that were unwelcome in public life, has become accessible to all. Like the drag balls that started as havens for black queer people (minorities within a minority) but have now become so popular (with Drag Race and Ryan Murphy’s Pose) that their language of fierceness and queens has been co-opted by straight whites across the western world. Which is fine and lovely, as long as we straights acknowledge the bigotry that meant these places, now held up as glamorous and aspirational, were the only rooms in which some were allowed to be themselves.
We can’t have it all. This summer the biggest ever survey of the UK’s LGBT community reported that more than two-thirds of respondents had avoided holding hands with their partner in public; despite the public’s love affair with camp, homophobia is alive and well beneath the surface. It is easy to embrace camp as a straight white person, to play with it, try on the feathers – we risk nothing. Before the straight world is allowed unfettered access to gay culture, we should earn it.
But as fashion party themes go, this is far more interesting than this year’s tarts and vicars experiment. And, as feminist theorist Judith Butler argued, drag stars and divas reveal the “hyperbolic status of the norm itself”, the fakeness of gender roles, the depths of our everyday performances, with the make-up, the smiles.
Will the 2019 Met Gala cause a mass realisation among its guests and on Instagram, as the very weight of campness that night topples everything we thought we knew about our own identities, about what it means to be a woman? That would be nice. More likely, but no less excitingly, we will see Rihanna as Louis XIV, and Lady Gaga will wear a wig that looks like Putin, and there will be meaningful commentary about fashion as a powerful political tool and also some fabulous gossip from the smoking area about you-know-who’s you-know-what.
Despite my discomfort at the way many of us swish through gay culture, taking what we please and disregarding the rest, I can only hope that this mainstreaming of camp does not sanitise it, or rid it of its essential tension, nor simply cover our remaining bigotry with a piece of chiffon. Instead, may it work to confront homophobia and throw us forward into a time when prejudice is dead and intolerance dissolved. But, a word of warning across the years, addressing the army of models lining up to be dressed in dresses printed with pictures of a dress, from Sontag herself: “You can’t do camp on purpose.”
One more thing
Urban Outfitters is selling an ‘Influencer’ Halloween costume. It consists of 1 x bra-top and 1 x leggings. Brings new meaning to the term ‘ghosting’.
Opening this week at the Studio Voltaire gallery in south London is the Oscar Wilde Temple. It’s half art show, half church, and visitors are invited to use the temple for LGBT rites, including vow renewals and transgender naming ceremonies. Proceeds go to the Albert Kennedy Trust, a charity that helps the LGBT homeless. Get married in a gallery of martyrs, beneath the deity of Oscar Wilde.
A week before the royal baby announcement, Princess Diana’s psychic, Simone Simmons, told the Daily Star Meghan was pregnant – ‘something about the look on her face’. In past conversations with Diana (deceased), Simmons learned ‘she doesn’t believe Meghan’s the one’ and that she would’ve backed Brexit. If only the tabloids still tapped phones.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
