If you thought this year's "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination" Met Gala theme was beautifully insane, just wait till 2019!
Next year's theme and co-chairs have just been announced, and people are losing their minds. The theme will be "Camp: Notes on Fashion," inspired by cultural critic Susan Sontag's seminal 1964 essay, "Notes on Camp."
Camp, for the uninitiated, is a sort of exaggerated or theatrical style, usually dripping with irony, often for humorous effect. Perhaps its best known form is drag, but there are many forms of camp. Or as the Met Gala's curator explains it, by way of Sontag, camp is "love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration...style at the expense of content...the triumph of the epicene style." ("Epicene" means effeminate, it turns out. The more you know!)
So think something drag-adjacent, add it together with fashion, multiply it by the always-crackers Met Gala, and just imagine what we're gonna get in 2019!
Then layer on the co-chairs: Harry Styles (swoon), Serena Williams (BOSS) and...wait for it... Lady Gaga.
2019👏GONNA👏BE👏BONKERS👏
And if that weren't amazing enough, the 2019 sponsor will be Gucci, the fashion house where designer Alessandro Michele has incorporated elements like balaclavas and human heads into his runway shows.
And really, can you think of a better combination of cuckoo for these batshit-crazy times in which we live? Precisely why the Costume Institute selected the theme. Speaking to the New York Times, the Institutes curator Andrew Bolton explained that, "We are going through an extreme camp moment, and it felt very relevant to the cultural conversation to look at what is often dismissed as empty frivolity but can be actually a very sophisticated and powerful political tool, especially for marginalized cultures." He went on to invoke our headline-maker-in chief: "Whether it's pop camp, queer camp, high camp or political camp - Trump is a very camp figure - I think it's very timely."
Couldn't agree more! And between the crazy of the theme and the on social media, people were losing. their. minds.
And, of course, there were puns!
Though not everyone was impressed:
But after this year's cuckoopants Met Gala, seems pretty certain next year is going to be certifiably insane. Is it May yet?!
H/T CNN, NY Daily News
