One of the fashion industry's most popular event, the Metropolitan Musuem costume gala will be back on May 6 2019, and the theme will look at fashion, art, Susan Sontag's essay and the large influence of pop culture.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s 2019 exhibition will be “Camp: Notes on Fashion” , which will run from May 9 through to September 8, 2019.
Andrew Bolton, the Wendy Yu curator in charge of the Costume Institute, has framed the exhibition around Susan Sontag’s seminal 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’ which speaks on he different ways in which the concept of Camp can be construed.
Bolton explains that he found Sontag’s writings—in a nutshell, she argued that camp is the “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration, style at the expense of content, the triumph of the epicene style”—so timely with what we are going through culturally and politically that, “I felt it would have a lot of cultural resonance.”
Camp, as Bolton notes, “has become increasingly more mainstream in its pluralities—political camp, queer camp, Pop camp, the conflation of high and low, the idea that there is no such thing as originality.”
Bolton continues to explaun that Camp has been described as style without content. “But I think you’ve got to be incredibly sophisticated to understand camp—look at Yves Saint Laurent and Marc Jacobs.”
Great contemporary examples of Camp in fashion can include the works from Franco Moschino, Jeremy Scott for Moschino, Virgil Abloh x Off White, John Galliano, and Thom Browne.
Jeremy Scott for Moschino Fall/Winter 2018. Picture: Pinterest
Other new age designers who have the influence of Camp include Richard Quinn, and Matty Bovan; Madrid's Palomo Spain; and New York’s Vaquera and Gypsy Sport’s Rio Uribe.
Virgil Abloh x Off White Pre-Fall 2018. Picture: Supplied
The exhibition, which will be presented in the Met Fifth Avenue’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall, is made possible by Gucci.
Franco Moschino for House of Moschino, 1991. Picture: Supplied
For Gucci’s creative director Alessandro Michele, Sontag’s essay “perfectly expresses what camp truly means to me: the unique ability of combining high art and pop culture.”
"No one growing up on a diet of Italian television and pop stars such as Mina, Patty Pravo, and Raffaella Carrà in the 1980s could be a stranger to the concept of camp".
Bolton also points out embraces elements that include “irony, humor, parody, pastiche, artifice, theatricality, excess, extravagance, nostalgia, and exaggeration”—all of which can, by turns, be discovered in Michele’s playful Gucci oeuvre.
Thom Browne Spring/Summer 2018. Picture: Thom Browne
It has also been announced that the co-chairs for the costume gala, happening on May 6 will be Lady Gaga, Alessandro Michele, Harry Styles, Serena Williams, and Anna Wintour.
Pop singer and actor Harry Styles. Picture: Pinterest