Andrew Bolton’s notes on camp

Andrew Bolton is something of a victim of his own success. The visionary curator behind record-breaking fashion exhibitions like Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty and Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination has so firmly cemented fashion’s status as an art form that in recent years other august institutions—from New York’s MoMA to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts—are following suit. On one hand, this increased popularity has made Bolton’s job (as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute head curator) more complicated in the way of securing archive pieces and displaying them in a way that doesn’t seem trite, on the other it has impelled him to be even more daring.

“For many years fashion curators, myself included, were too apologetic in their approach,” Bolton explains, when we meet in Milan’s flamboyantly decorated Teatro Gerolamo. “Fashion is so connected to the body and issues of identity they cannot be separated. It’s my responsibility to challenge people’s preconceived ideas about a subject and the medium of clothing.”

Camp: Notes on Fashion (opening with the Met Gala on 6 May) explores the origins of camp’s spirited but complex and highly nuanced aesthetic. As Bolton knows all too well, there are many preconceived notions that needed to be challenged when approaching the subject. “People have a definite idea of what camp is—that it’s superficial, about gay men and transvestites,” he says. “And it is that, but it’s many other things too.” Pertinent though his message may be, it is conveyed through some deliciously fun fashion—think Alessandro Michele’s tromp l’oeil capes from the Gucci AW16 collection, men’s crotchless leather chaps designed by Jeremy Scott (SS12) and Marjan Pejoski’s swan dress famously worn by Björk to the 73rd Academy Awards in 2001.

Bolton used American writer Susan Sontag’s seminal 1964 essay Notes on Camp as a framework, honing in on her idea that “in naïve, or pure Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails.” It’s a controversial text: by Sontag’s own admission, “to talk about camp is to betray it,” and the gay community felt they had been outed when it was published. This was five years before the Stonewall riots of 1969—widely considered the birth of the Pride movement—and it would be almost four decades before the Supreme Court decriminalised homosexuality in the US. Camp had, until then, been the gay community’s secret language—a way of communicating and finding common ground. Sontag invariably made camp mainstream. Bolton feels, however, she is often unfairly criticised for this. “Susan wasn’t writing about camp as a political phenomenon, or as a gay phenomenon, she was writing about it as an aesthetic,” he says.

The camp aesthetic can be retroactively traced back over centuries. The first entry of the word “camp” in the dictionary is cited as the early 20th century, with a definition that read “actions and gestures of exaggerated emphasis, used chiefly by persons of an exceptional want of character.” Such mannerisms are there in the contrapposto stance of Michelangelo’s David; the limp wrists of the characters depicted in Kitagawa Utamaro’s woodblock prints, and in the comedic plays of William Shakespeare such as As You Like It, in which one male actor, playing a girl who is disguised as a boy, theatrically calls to the man they love: “Call me Ganymede”.

Despite its ubiquity, Bolton has come to the conclusion that camp is almost impossible to define, likening it to the amorphousness of “an amoeba” or “liquid mercury”. Even Notes on Camp is “written as jottings” because “that’s what camp is—a series of random expressions”. Try to impose structure on these expressions, he warns, and “it all falls apart”.

But exhibitions are stories and stories are made up of a sequence of events, so Bolton had to arrange camp into some form of narrative arc, which he admits was a challenge.

First he transports us to the courts of Louis XIV, a room “anchored” by an ensemble from Karl Lagerfeld’s AW87 collection for Chanel, inspired by Versailles. On the wall, Hyacinthe Rigaud’s painting of King Louis will be installed alongside a lifesize portrait of his younger brother, Philippe, who went by the pseudonym Monsieur and devoted his life to dancing and dressing up—primarily in women’s clothes. From here, we are introduced to Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton, aka Fanny and Stella, who in 1870 were the subject of a sensational trial that gripped England, after they were arrested for dressing in women’s clothes to cajole men. Fortuitously, Erdem devoted his SS19 collection to Fanny and Stella’s drag wardrobes and two dresses from the collection will stand in the centre of the gallery.

Sontag’s Notes on Camp aside, literature plays a pivotal role in the exhibition. Bolton takes us back in time to the cross-dressing nightclub scene of 1930s Berlin—so vividly described by Christopher Isherwood in novels like Goodbye to Berlin and Mr Norris Changes Trains—which is reflected in the unashamedly decadent designs of Palomo Spain. Oscar Wilde, meanwhile, represents the dictionary definition of camp. Robert Pennington’s portrait of the playwright wearing a dark brown frock coat will stand side-by-side with a similar design by Alessandro Michele for Gucci.

Bolton was partly inspired to create Camp: Notes on Fashion to “isolate an aesthetic that’s become so invisible, to show its roots and its origins and how political it’s still being without realising”. “When you talk to young kids about drag queens and gender fluidity,” he continues, “it’s not something they think about consciously, it seems like an old term to them because gay culture is, thankfully, so integrated in our lives.”

One place camp shines brighter than ever though is the red carpet. “There it’s about posing and performativity—acting up and dressing up,” says Bolton. When guests walk the hallowed stairs at the Met Gala this year, he anticipates the outfits “will be more playful, extravagant and adventurous. I’m hoping for more Cher-like Bob Mackie moments or Bjork-laying-an-egg moments”. The Met Gala dress code then could simply read—nothing too serious—after all, as Wilde put it, “seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow”.

Camp: Notes on Fashion is at the Met Museum, New York, from May 6 to September 8, 2019

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