The Campiest Revival of Camp
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Defined by Susan Sontag’s “Notes on “‘Camp,’” camp is “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” This word, in relation to fashion, originally began trending on Twitter in 2019 under the hashtag “#camp.” The beginning of the trend highlights the beginning of the camp revival in our Gen-Z modern-day media, cognitively at the 2019 Met Gala.
There is more to camp than the definition quoted from Susan Sontag previously though. According to ENG 154 with the one and only Roger Hallas ( a must-take by the way), camp is “resistance to good taste, inversion of values, embrace of excess and artifice, pleasure in the constructed nature of the work, (and) tension between affection and critique.” He also mentioned that “camp reads against the way that authors had intended, the way it was originally understood when first seen, (and) the way mainstream audiences understand it.” In mainstream media, camp most commonly is shown as the art of performing something over-exaggeratedly. Yet, camp has always been a huge part of LGBTQ culture, which is objectively less mainstream, or at least has been for many years.
Combining all of these defining pieces of camp, including LGBT culture, we reach RuPaul's Drag Race, of course. Drag is an over-exaggerated performance of gender that reads against the grain of gender, as well as critiques it. Drag has been popular for a very long time, but in Gen Z it’s been very popular since RuPaul's Drag Race’s release in 2009. This is not the first time in modern history that camp has been a part of (more) popular media though, its themes carry on throughout history, more famously in 1999’s But I’m a Cheerleader or honestly any Disney Channel Original, especially Harper from Wizards of Waverly Place. The undertones of camp in our media coming from Drag’s popularity and campy themes in mainstream films have led to the coalescence of its revival with the 2019 Met Gala.
When the 2019 Met Gala came around, many people were confused by the theme, unsure of what it meant and how to evaluate the stars who tried to pull this theme off. YouTubers like HauteLeMode and Chris Klemen made videos attempting to explain the theme, as well as rating each star's attempt. These videos blew up with Chris Klemens’ video, Brutally Honest Review of Met Gala 2019, getting 1.4 million views. These videos reference Susan Sontag’s piece and definition piece. Cognitively, the media began to recognize camp as itself, and began to tie it into the subconscious love of drag, and unknown camp.
With the recent Met Gala in September of 2021, social media blew up again by looking at past campy looks, unknowingly birthing a meme. Tiktok users started making videos such as “Me ironically being mentally stable because it’s camp,” (posted by user @imyrkitty.) Ironically enough she is using the word camp wrong, as most TikTok users are (seen under the TikTok hashtag, #camp with 2.1 Billion views). Which in the end, is the campiest use of the word of all.