You may have noticed that fashion has become rather flamboyant in recent seasons. No, we’re not talking about the eternal swinging between minimalism and maximalism, but rather a more wholehearted embrace of all things OTT. Designers have been dreaming up clothes that leap out of an Instagram timeline and grab your attention; we’re talking acres of smocked tulle, fanciful flights of feathers, dramatic Pierrot ruffles, sculptural shark-fin shoulders and more sparkle than the night sky. In other words, fashion has upped the camp factor, just in time for a major exhibition and the event of the year.
Next week, The Metropolitan of Museum of Art in New York will open its doors to ‘Camp: Notes in Fashion’, an exhibition that takes its cue from cultural critic Susan Sontag’s seminal 1964 essay ‘Notes on Camp’, which helped define and explain a creative movement and sensibility with a 58-point guide. Sontag described the essence of camp as its love of the “unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.”