The Met’s Costume Institute threw its big annual bash last night, and despite some confusion over the year’s campy theme, most of the celebrity guests did just fine, sticking to some of camp’s more obvious tropes, like ruffles, feathers and big hair.
But several stars decided to revel in camp’s gender-bending ethos — a more subtle, and complicated interpretation of the theme.
Harry Styles explored his femme side in an ethereal lace Gucci top with a flouncy pussy bow, while Demi Moore and Danai Gurira channeled the cross-dressing glam of camp icons Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, in sexy tuxedo gowns and, in Gurira’s case, a top hat. There were quite a few guys in skirts.
But while gender-fluidity and cross-dressing play an important role in camp’s history, as fashion and queer historian Michael Mamp previously told The Post, the Met Gala red carpet — along with the accompanying exhibit, “Camp: Notes on Fashion” — at times felt dangerously close to equating alternative gender expression with the flashy, exuberant excess of camp.
It’s true that in the late 19th century, camp was often equated with not just homosexuality, but with cross-dressing. “Camp,” the exhibit, has a photo of the notorious Victorian cross-dressing pair “Fanny and Stella,” who referred to their dressing up in women’s garb as “camping.” Christopher Isherwood, in his books chronicling gay, countercultural life in decadent 1930s Berlin, often referred to camp. Garbo and Dietrich became sex symbols and gay, camp icons because of the way they played with gender expectations, appearing on screen in ostentatiously outre men’s suiting.
But camp found its ultimate expression in drag culture, which took the camp-defining artificial glamour found in cabaret, fashion, theater and Hollywood — and turned it up to 11.
“Camp is about stepping outside of the boundaries of what society typically expects,” says fashion historian Mamp. “So if you think of it from that perspective, someone who identifies somewhere in the LGBTQ-plus spectrum, has historically or personally or societally has been felt or made to feel like they are forced into a box that doesn’t feel right.”
Drag, he adds, is a particularly expressive “way to break out of that box.”
But there’s a difference between drag, which is a performance — even if what it expresses is authentic — and gender-nonconformity, which often isn’t. For some, wearing a suit or a dress or makeup is not a matter of playing with or subverting society’s expectations but simply expressing their true gender, the one they were not assigned at birth but best describes them.
Some of the Met Gala’s gender-twisting looks get the drag camp ethos, such as Michael Urie’s fabulously queer half-suit, half-pink-ballgown ensemble by Christian Siriano, a designer who has proved extraordinarily adept at dressing those who don’t conform to society’s expectations, gender or otherwise. Ditto Tiffany Haddish’s “pimp” look, which scholar Shelby Ivey Christie said on Twitter, showed off the campy “exaggerated displays of masculinity/peacocking” in an over-the-top, almost trolling way.
But for a night celebrating the annihilating queerness of camp, many of its gender-bending were disappointingly straightforward, which not only seemed to miss the point (and the fun!) but sent a square backwards message: that to be camp is to be gender-nonconforming, and vice versa. But in today’s more gender-fluid, open society, perhaps the most camp thing of all would be to show up to the Met Gala in the most cliched, gender-conforming look possible, which would make Gwyneth Paltrow, in her frilly feminine nightgown, perhaps the queen of the night.
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