Carry on

CARDI B

Camp is difficult to explain but easy to spot once you’ve got the hang of it. This is my interpretation based on my opinions, other people might describe it differently.

Susan Sontag, in ‘notes on ‘Camp’’, describes camp as “the consistently aesthetic experience of the world” “the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture” and “anti-serious”. Camp is a fashion movement, but is also a way of approaching the world, individual people can be called camp.

The word is strongly associated with the lgbtq+ community and more specifically with gay men. Camp fashion is ugly and overblown. Camp has to be grand to be truly camp, it has to be enthusiastically appalling. It is associated with theatrical fashion and certainly contains the drama and passion of the stage. Camp is about enjoying and embracing fully an aesthetic that isn’t ‘chic’, stylish or pretty but one that is dramatic, loud and frivolous. Camp is ugly, it’s big, it’s colourful, it’s silly, it’s fun.

It’s been described as apolitical but I think it is rather political, especially within the lgbtq+ community when dressing unconventionally signals your membership to a marginalized group. Camp is snubbing your nose at how people say you ‘should’ dress while still believing firmly in self decoration.

Camp is rather ironic, in that dressing camp is a careful fashion choice with a result that is ‘unfashionable’. This is what people are going to struggle with most at the met gala, I think. They’ll cling to ‘pretty’ and aim at ‘glamorous’ and miss ‘camp’ by a mile.

Nants ingonyama bagithi baba [Here comes a lion, Father] Sithi uhm ingonyama [Oh yes, it’s a lion] Nants ingonyama bagithi baba [Here comes a lion, Father] Sithi uhm ingonyama [Oh yes, it’s a lion] Ingonyama [It’s a lion] Siyo Nqoba [We’re going to conquer] Ingonyama Ingonyama nengw’ enamabala [A lion and a leopard come to this open place] (repeats) [queue English lyrics]

Also, learn what speech is exempt from it, like, for instance, fighting words. Words that by their very utterance inflict injury, and speech that incites an immediate breach of the peace, kind of like, yknow, saying you want to exterminate all of their kind of people. Basically, talk shit get hit is 100% protected.