Camping It Up
By Eric La Rosee
Photo by Emma Sutich
Following last year’s Met Gala, people all over offered their own definitions of what it truly means for something to be “camp,” often in order to evaluate how well various public figures embodied the theme.
Abstract aesthetic qualities like this are often difficult to nail down, but my own concept of it can be summed up fairly well by the phrase “oh, that’s so tacky; I love it.”
Because ‘good’ taste is most often defined in our society by those with socioeconomic and political power, art and fashion tend to be called tacky, as author Jo Weldon observes in her article “Who Gets to Decide What’s Tacky Anyway?” when they are “feminine, ethnic, queer, deviant; not manly, not practical, not businesslike, not serious.” An example of this which comes to mind for me is that of long, brightly-colored acrylic nails, which have been called tacky quite often, especially when worn by working-class women, women of color, and LGBTQ people.
An essential detail of my working definition, too, is that one does not say “I love it” with irony. Filling your home with someone’s antique, handmade figurines of cats as a joke, for example, would not be camp; it’d just be mockery à la hipster irony of the mid-2010’s, as well as kind of mean-spirited.
Rather, camp is to see something, recognize the ways in which it fails to adhere to the exclusive and hegemonic ‘good’ taste which demands seriousness from its art, and to love it regardless. It’s why we love silly, earnest movies, even though we know they’ll never get an Oscar nomination.
Camp is a giant part of how I’ve cultivated my personal tastes and aesthetic, both because I love the rebellion it represents as a Queer person, and because I think it makes the world a kinder and more fun place when you go out of your way to find beauty in what other people might write off as silly and ugly. The pessimistic view might be that I walk around in my day-to-day life looking like a Gay clown, but I would counter that I walk around in my day-to-day life looking like a Gay clown and loving it.
If this sounds like a vibe you would like to embody more with your personal style, here are a few principles I try to keep in mind:
“Wearable” is a myth. Unless you are in a wedding, funeral, or job interview, anything you can put on your body and be comfortable in is wearable. You’re allowed to wear things that might call attention to you, regardless of age, race, class, or gender, and people are often far more enthusiastic about your look than you would expect.
DIY is so, so much fun. For example, I have a friend who realized that you can get earring hooks at the craft store, and has since had such items hanging from her ears as Chapstick, small trophies, worm-on-a-strings, Kinder Egg toys, board game pieces, and once, a sealed packet of Gushers. I always look forward to seeing what she’ll come up with next.
It feels really good to be silly. Startling yourself in your car mirror because you forgot you’d gotten boba with a friend in Halloween face paint (and a mask!) is hilarious. There’s no reason to deny yourself a good laugh on the pretense that no, this is serious face paint.
Swing big. The worst that can happen is that you don’t look your best that day, and even then, you’ve learned something by experimenting. Photos from when I first started dyeing my hair may not display great technical skill on my end, but I still look at them fondly because I remember just how excited I was for that patchy head of neon pink.
And finally, cuffing your sleeves and/or tucking it in will make almost any top into a look.