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Before we dive into the history of camp, it’s worth noting that there’s one very simple explanation for the Met Gala’s embrace of pink. Pink is just very hot this year: It was a huge runway look, and one of the biggest trends on the Oscars red carpet. If you’re a fashion person in 2019, you need no excuse to go pink.

But everyone involved in the Met Gala seemed to be thinking of pink as a camp hue. Wintour even noted that she was changing the red carpet color specifically to match the theme.

So to try to figure out why the forces behind the Met Gala seemed to view pink as not only on trend but also self-evidently camp, I called up Pamela Wojcik, a film scholar and the author of Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna.

Traditionally, to the extent that there was ever any particular color associated with camp, it was lavender, says Wojcik. (“They even lavendered my book cover,” she noted.) That’s mostly because lavender codes queer, and camp is associated with queer culture.

Still, camp has also had an affinity with pink for a long time. In the highly camp 1957 movie Funny Face, there’s an entire musical number devoted to a woman’s magazine editor ordering the women of the world to “think pink!” while pink-clad dancers frolic around her, unscrolling bolts of bright pink fabric and posing in bright pink doorways.

“Feels so gay, feels so bright, makes your day, makes your night,” they sing. “Pink is now the color to which you gotta switch!”