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Simon Doonan on what it means to be truly camp

What do Dani Dyer, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Cardi B, Lady Bracknell, and a giant art nouveau vase covered in fairies and stuffed with peacock feathers have in common? Here’s a clue: it’s a four-letter word beginning with C. Here’s another clue: it’s the theme of this Monday’s Met Gala in New York.

In late 2018 the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that this year’s Costume Institute Gala would pay homage to… drum roll… Camp. Yes, C-A-M-P — that strange, elusive sensibility — will inspire the most fashionable red carpet event of the year.

As junior pundits struggle to define this mysterious concept, I realise that I, the Sixties dandy in the flowery shirt, the old geezer who can quote every line from the film Mommie Dearest ­— ‘No wire hangers!’… ‘Tina, bring me the axe!’ — have an obligation to drape myself across my puce velvet chaise longue and offer up some kind of clarification. Warning: we camp people are not especially inclined towards helpfulness, but I will do my best.

During the height of my camp youth, Susan Sontag — the feminist intellectual with the camp skunk stripe in her hair — published her famous 1964 essay, Notes on Camp. It was an academic attempt to differentiate true camp from that which is merely tacky or kitsch or ironic. #Missionimpossible. In homage to Sue, I offer my version, updated and made accessible for the age of attention deficit disorder. Instead of 58 notes, there are 10. And, if you don’t mind, I prefer to call them bullet points. It’s so much more camp.

(SIPA USA/PA Images)
(SIPA USA/PA Images)

1. Camp is a lethal combo of artifice, theatricality and exaggeration. Vintage examples: Carmen Miranda with a basket of fruit on her head or Jayne Mansfield striking burlesque attitudes in a leopard-print bikini. Contemporary examples: Lady Gaga, an often unsmiling circus act of avant-garde exhibitionism, and Kim Kardashian, that unknowable super-vixen, the voluptuous fertility symbol drowning in cash, perpetually poised for a selfie.

2. Camp people often don’t realise they are camp. Earnestness and conviction are cornerstones of camp. See Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced Bouquet), but also Mussolini and Louis XIV and any other flashily attired tyrant. Yes, camp people are nice, but not always.

3. Camp is oblivious to class, encompassing people, styles and objects from every nook and cranny of society. Always remember that Lily Savage and Marie Antoinette share the same hairdo. Versailles, with its non-ironic obsession with adornment and prestige, is undeniably camp but so is Butlin’s. Speaking of which, I owe my camp awakening to a two-week stay at Minehead Butlin’s in 1962. The fake decor — plastic parrots and orchids dangled in profusion above the indoor swimming pool, creating a jungle ambience — unleashed my camp sensibility. I found myself emulating the poses and animated expressions of people who might actually be swimming in a lagoon in a Dorothy Lamour movie. I understood the delicious camp of whatever you do in life — be it smoking a fag, buttoning a cardi or devouring a slice of Battenberg cake — you do as if a giant film crew were lensing the occasion.

4. Camp transforms the grandiose into the mundane. Camp is me abbreviating Susan Sontag to Sue. Camp is Private Eye nicknaming our beloved monarch Brenda. Camp is Madonna being redubbed Madge by the Brits. Camp is me referring to Mourinho as Maureen, just because I feel like it.

5. Camp clutches at everything, even footie managers, with shrill enthusiasm. As Sontag noted, ‘Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp but a “lamp”; not a woman but a “woman”.’ The extreme vernacular of today’s social media — ‘OMG!’ ‘Dying!’ — has its roots in Sixties camp when passionate declarations such as ‘Too much!’ and ‘Far out!’ were commonplace.

“Camp followers have no petty likes or dislikes. We masticate everything. We adore everything. Everything is ours”

6. Camp is apolitical. Back in the day, my camp pals in their leopard-print slacks and Beatle booties only took an interest in politics when scandal was brewing. (We thought Mandy Rice Davies, the star of the Profumo scandal, was très camp.) The Met Gala will, hopefully, present an opportunity for millennials to escape the current era where everything is politicised (yawn). We campers use aesthetics to distance ourselves from the grim brutality of life. When contemplating his mortality, Oscar Wilde is reputed to have said: ‘This wallpaper will be the death of me. One of us will have to go.’ When the Second World War broke out, the late, great Quentin Crisp rushed out and bought two pounds of henna. Armageddon was one thing, but running out of hair dye? Are you insane?

7. Camp can be queeny and gay, but it ain’t necessarily so. Yes, Alan Carr is camp, but so is Donald Trump, the panto villain with the orange meringue on his head. Ivan the Terrible was high camp, equalled only by Yvonne the Terrible, my mum’s hairdresser who was tyrannical, especially when it came to bleaching and bouffants.

8. Camp is naughty. The old preconceived notions of respectability and convention become laughable in the face of the decadence of camp. ‘Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!’ screeches camp icon Auntie Mame (Rosalind Russell) at her frowzy housekeeper Agnes Gooch in the eponymous film. Powerless to resist, the latter discards her orthopedic Oxfords and returns home days later, hungover and with child.

9. Camp, according to cultural critic Philip Core, is the lie that tells the truth. Despite its cynical detachment, camp art can be enormously powerful, as evidenced by the recent Edward Burne-Jones show at the Tate. (There I was, quivering with emotion before the campest paintings in history.) The great camp movie canon — Mildred Pierce, Imitation of Life, Written on The Wind, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg — will always send you lurching for the Kleenex. And then there’s Adele. Although her camply melodramatic tales of lost love and disappointment would appear to have a minimal connection to her bouncy Cockney self, they nonetheless pack a massive emotional and artistic punch.

10. Camp is vulgar. For camp followers, bad taste and good taste are seen to have equal value. Russ Meyer sexploitation movies such as Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! are spoken of in the same breath as the Elgin Marbles. In this regard we camp people are superior to everyone else. We have no petty likes and dislikes. No thumbs up or thumbs down. We masticate everything. We adore everything. Everything is ours.

Still none the wiser? Don’t reproach yourself. Nobody really understands it, me included. Camp is a mysterious shape-shifting miasma of fabulosity. That’s all you really need to know. Dive into the Tahitian lagoon and swim around. And if you are headed to the Met Gala and wish to dress as per the theme, then I suggest you rummage in your closet for a skintight Thierry Mugler space alien hooker dress or that vintage Moschino teddy bear coat. For a more current look, visit Viktor & Rolf. Its recent couture collection of message frocks — massive organdy debutante dresses emblazoned with bitchy/banal slogans — will see you right. When you arrive at the Met Gala remember to suck in your cheeks (both sets) and comport yourself in the manner of one attending the most talked-about red carpet event of the year. And if you haven’t been invited, just mince about at home as if you had.

‘Drag: The Complete Story’ by Simon Doonan is out in autumn (Laurence King Publishing, £30)