Museums & GalleriesUpper East Side
Camp: Notes on Fashion
5/14/2019Updated 5/15/2019
Featuring roughly 250 garments, shoes and hats, the Costume Institute’s spring 2019 exhibition focuses on camp as a visual aesthetic and a form of identity. The show draws its theme from Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’” which defines the style as a “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.”
Camp opens with a look at the court and dress of King Louis XIV at Versailles, before tracing the history of dandies in Europe and America in the late 19th century and moving into the tension between naïve and deliberate camp in fashion today. Click through our gallery for a look at some prime examples of the aesthetic, and go see what camp is for yourself at the Met Fifth Avenue through September 8.