Every year on the first Monday of May a host of stars and fashionistas come together to celebrate and support the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s latest exhibition.
The Met Gala is held in the evening to raise money for the museum and the dress code matches the subject of the annual exhibit.
Naturally interpretations of the theme are generally as flamboyant as possible as the stars attempt to grab headlines on the red carpet.
Previous themes have included Punk: Chaos to Couture, China: Through the Looking Glass and Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.
This year’s is titled Camp: Notes on Fashion, here we explain what that actually means.
What does Camp: Notes on Fashion mean?
This year the theme is based on American writer and activist Susan Sontag’s first major essay, Notes on ‘Camp’, which she wrote in 1964.
It was chosen by the curator of the Costume Institute, Andrew Bolton, because he felt Susan’s essay was a good fit for what is going on culturally and politically in the world at this moment in time.
The exhibition in the museum looks at the origins of ‘Camp’ from the 17th century and the court of Versailles to today.
In her essay Sontag tried to define what she believed ‘camp’ to mean, although she also said it was impossible to define in one way.
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Some quotes from her writings may shed a light on how the celebs and fashion elite will interpret the theme for their outfits.
Sontag wrote that camp is: “the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off’ of things-being-what-they-are-not."
She also said it was “the metaphor of life as theatre” and “the attempt to do something extraordinary. But extraordinary in the sense, often, of being special, glamorous.”
And a quote we predict Lady Gaga may use as inspiration: “The whole point of camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious.”
