Louis XIV and Oscar Wilde, meet Bjork and Lady Gaga.
What quality do they share, across the centuries? An innate sense of camp -- the esthetic that's being celebrated in the new fashion mega-exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute, "Camp: Notes on Fashion."
The exhibit is built around author Susan Sontag's 1964 "Notes on 'Camp,"' a 58-point essay which she dedicated to Oscar Wilde, the 19th century poet and playwright whose camp sensibility is also featured in the show. Camp "is not a natural mode of sensibility," she wrote. "The essence ... is its love of the unnatural, of artifice and exaggeration."
And so the exhibit, which features some 250 items, begins with history -- and a grammar lesson. The term "camp" was first used as a French verb -- "se camper," or to flaunt -- in the 17th century. In a 1671 Moliere play, the character Scapin tells a fellow servant to "Camp about on one leg. Put your hand on your hip. Wear a furious look. Strut about like a drama king.
There are enormous feathered dresses -- Sontag wrote that camp was "a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers" -- by Armani and by Jeremy Scott, the latter surrounded by scores of attached butterflies. Scott, a specialist in camp, also is represented by a dress of dollar bills, and his McDonald's-themed outfits for Moschino, where he serves as creative director.
And maybe there isn't a Lady Gaga meat dress, but there's a Jeremy Scott "prosciutto dress" , and his wacky TV dinner cape -- with carrots, peas and corn on one side, mashed potatoes with butter on the other
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