The Met Gala 2019: Historic Elusive theme 'Camp: Notes on Fashion' to Revolve Textures, Structures & Siloette at Avante Garde Exhibition

Clothing, Textiles, and Interior Design to Manifest Extraordinary Museum at this year’s 2019 Met Gala held at The Met in NYC.

On Monday, the Metropolitan Museum will have its yearly slam for the Costume Institute, and the topic, "Camp: Notes on Fashion," apparently has the glitterati scratching their heads.

In the event that last year's Catholic-concept Met Gala was something quizzing as possible, the current year's event is projected to be as befuddled. It doesn't support that the subject — for the gathering and the going with Exhibition, opening Thursday — originates from a Susan Sontag paper distributed in 1964.

Indeed, even occasion producer Anna Wintour is confused.

“The only advice I ever really give to [Costume Institute director] Andrew [Bolton] is, whatever the title of the exhibition is, make sure that everybody understands it immediately,” Anna Wintour said in a recent Vogue video, adding that the theme “has created a little bit of confusion.”

Camp — not the dozing outside kind, however the sashay-shantay, over-the-top assortment found in the kooky movies of John Waters or the marvelous overabundance of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” — “is an esoteric concept,” history specialist Monica Sklar, of the Costume Society of America, reveals to The Post.

Fashion's biggest night, the highly anticipated Met Gala, is days away, and we got a sneak peek at the year's theme, Camp: Notes on Fashion. The exclusive annual event at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City features A-list guests from movie, music and fashion industries. Nikki Battiste reports.

It's unexpected yet earnest; stylish yet shabby; so awful it's great; to an extreme and without flaw. It's Joan Crawford and Bette Davis playing up their genuine fight on-screen. It's Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper playing up their on-screen acting on the Oscars organize. It's, as Sontag herself clarified, “a woman walking around in a dress made of 3 million feathers.”

Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour sits down with Jenna Bush Hager as the fashion icon prepares for next week's 2019 Met Gala. Wintour talks more about this year's theme, who her ideal guests are and that rumored no-selfie rule.

“It’s niche. It’s countercultural. It’s the opposite of ‘Heavenly Bodies,’ ” Sklar says, alluding to the Costume Institute's last blockbuster. “And it’s absolutely timely.”

Michael Mamp, a style educator at Central Michigan University, concurs.

“Camp is about stepping outside of the boundaries of what society typically expects,” he says. “And you see more and more people pushing against those boundaries, especially with gender . . . Dress and fashion is an incredibly powerful tool to explore that.”

Sontag followed camp back to seventeenth century France, where Louis XIV assembled his place of worship to ingenuity and lavishness, Versailles. In that plated royal residence, individuals from the court wore voluminous dresses that totally mutilated the human body and transcending wigs that opposed gravity — a pattern that achieved its peak with the powdered hair figures worn by Marie Antoinette.

However nobody truly called the Versailles tasteful "camp." And while the word was utilized in Victorian England — for the most part as coded language for homosexuality, including for the ostentatious author and person of good taste Oscar Wilde — it required a long investment for a sort of "camp stylish" to combine.

Camp Aesthetics from Original days of its inheritance. /Courtesy of @HauteLaMode

Camp Aesthetics from Original days of its inheritance. /Courtesy of @HauteLaMode

“When we look at early films, particularly of the 1930s, we see these celebrations of beauty that is exaggerated and clearly artificial,” says Mamp. He refers to the gonzo musicals of Busby Berkeley and the glitzy hauteur of stars like Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, who paraded show by showing up in drag without reducing — and perhaps improving — their sex advance. Rather than killing watchers, these implausible, frequently silly dreams motivated amazement.

"When you take a gander at camp iconography, it's about people who have been eager and who have attempted — either through peculiarity, or dress, or execution — to venture outside of their recommended box or sexual orientation desire," says Mamp, including Joan Crawford, Diana Vreeland, Judy Garland, RuPaul and, all the more as of late, Lady Gaga to the blend.

“Camp uses the artificial to express the authentic,”says Mamp, adding that it drives straightforwardly to drag — and the present progressively test mentalities toward sex and independence. It's the reason originators these days are especially attracted to camp. It's unadulterated dream, with a wink. It can change the body (a la Bjork's notorious swan dress, or Victor and Rolf's poufy image ballgowns); obscure one's sexual orientation (think "Pose" star Billy Porter's mixture tux-dress he wore to the Oscars as of late) and revel in what camp saint John Waters calls "great awful taste" (Marc Jacobs' Joan Crawford-printed dresses, Jeremy Scott's stylish tributes to Vanna White).

“It is neither nihilistic nor self-defensive,” says Sklar, including that its grip of the counterfeit and marvelous is liberating. "You can say it's enabling."

 
 

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