Camp knows it is fake, and that is exactly the point
Kitsch and camp both love excess, but only camp is in on the joke. The word may trace back to Italian slang for getting by, passed through the gay argot Polari, and it grew from sixteenth-century stage drag into a whole way of looking at art, fashion and film.
Camp prizes artifice, affectation and exaggeration, usually with a wink. Susan Sontag, whose 1964 essay 'Notes on "Camp"' made the idea famous, stressed frivolity and excess, yet art historian David Carrier argues it can also be subversive and political. Critics split it into high and low camp, or into naive camp that happens by accident and deliberate camp that is staged on purpose. Anthropologist Esther Newton, studying drag, boiled it down to three traits: incongruity, theatricality and humour.
The history is tangled. The Oxford English Dictionary finds camp used as a verb from at least the 1500s, and writer Bruce Rodgers links it to British theatre, where it meant men playing women. Other suggested roots include the French se camper, to strike an exaggerated pose. Anthony Burgess guessed it came from military encampments, where gay men signalled to one another through style. In 1870 the crossdresser Frederick Park mentioned his "campish undertakings" in a letter used as evidence at Bow Street, and in 1874 a Salford drag ball was billed as the "Queen of Camp".
For much of the twentieth century camp worked as a code for working-class gay men in Britain and a way of coping with hostility. Postmodernism and queer theory later widened it: lesbians, trans people and people of colour describe their own versions, from dyke camp to queer of color camp. Gay audiences had long relished the overheated melodramas of Douglas Sirk, decades before academics named the genre in the 1970s.
The mainstream eventually caught up. The 2019 Met Gala took Camp: Notes on Fashion as its theme, with Lady Gaga spending 16 minutes on an entrance that peeled through four outfits, starting from a pink gown with a 25-foot train. Curator Andrew Bolton argued that camp surges during polarised, unstable times such as the 1960s and 1980s, while critics like Jeanette Cooperman worry it loses its bite once everyone is doing it.
Source: Camp (style)
