The 2019 Met Gala: An Ode to Creativity

It would have been the most apt “campy” move of the evening, if someone had showed up in
kaki shorts and boots and maybe a whistle around the neck to the 2019 Met Gala themed
“Camp: Notes on Fashion.” That exaggeration and ignorance would have made for a perfect
campy move, except in an alternate universe in which celebrities were still gods who could
get away with anything. Those times are long gone. The backlash would have been massive.

The Met Gala which is organised by the Custom Institute’s theme this year “Camp: Notes on
Fashion” draws its origin from the famous essay by Susan Sontag “Notes on Camp.” In her
essay she tries to explain the phenomenon “camp.”

When I heard that the theme for the Met Gala this year is “Fashion: Notes on Camp” my first
thought was the Capitol in Suzanne Collins book, adapted into a movie of the same name The
Hunger Games; Its excess, all its make-up, all its feathers, all its hair and all its fire. Its flair
for the avant-garde dramatics is indeed what makes it the most vivid expression of camp in
modern day art. What camp demands is excessiveness but not burlesque, not to ridicule but to
amuse. What it does is inhabits the blurred lines of the absurd and the serious.

I was personally interested in what three creatives had to bring to the table. Kerby Jean-
Raymond -the avant-garde, Tom Ford- the perfectionist and Childish Gambino- the creator
(who with a heavy heart I got over his not making the bash this year.)

And so come the first Monday in May, as the perfect plastic barometers of taste all make their
way to the Metropolitan Museum of the Art singing a single ode to Hephaestus himself this
was what it sounded like.

I had guessed with friends that Kerby Jean-Raymond who snagged the CFDA/Vogue Fashion
Fund award last year and creative director of Pyer Moss would have made one of the loudest
statement at the event. He did and it was a bang with actress/filmmaker Lena Weithe (Mater
of None) wearing a lavender suit paying homage to drag queens -with the inscription “Black
drag queens invented camp” splashed on the back- made by him.

Harry Styles and Alessandro Michele at The Met Gala<br />

Billy Porter making his entrance on the red-carpet at the 2019 Met Gala

Omari Hardwick at the 2019 Met Gala

Rapper, 21 Savage in Dapper Dan at the 2019 Fashion Institute’s Met Gala