Starting next week, when the Met’s Costume Institute will open its anticipated show ‘Camp: Notes on Fashion,’ camp will be the talk of the season. Named after Susan Sontag’s 1964 iconic essay ‘Notes on Camp,’ the exhibition seeks to illuminate this cultural phenomenon, which according to the exhibition’s curator Andrew Bolton is having a moment. ‘The essence of Camp,’ Sontag noted ‘is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration,” referring to mass culture and to its distinctive taste. It was 8 years before Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown published their milestone Learning from Las Vegas, and put the powerful phenomenon of ‘Camp’ in the architecture/design narrative. Here are the examples of what I consider ‘campy,’ and would love to stimulate suggestions by my readers. What is ‘campy’ to you? Above: KAWS x Campana for Friedman Benda, 2018.
Train Crash by Studio Job, 2015.
Kylie Jenner
From ‘Learning from Las Vegas’ by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, 1972.
PPG Place, by John Burgee Architects and Philip Johnson, 1984
Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons from the ‘Art of the In-Between’ at the Met.
Medusa Dinnerware by Versace for Rosenthal, 1980s
Pedro Friedeberg