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Met Gala 2019 Pink Carpet

Posted On : May 9, 2019

Ann Mumbi

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Wojcik notes that a lot of what makes “Think Pink!” camp has nothing to do with the color itself. “It’s the insanity of the excess of pink and deciding this is all we care about right now,” she says. “It’s the randomness of dictates of fashion.”

But, she adds, “Think Pink!” is also camp because of the pink of it all: Pink is camp in part because pink is associated with girliness, and one way of doing camp is to burlesque gender. “Pink is stereotypically associated with hyperbolic femininity,” Wojcik says. “So camp is theatricalizing that, taking the stereotype of pink, reappropriating it and pushing it to an extreme of gender parody.”

Camp, says Wojcik, tends to live at the borders of gender: at the extremes, where gender becomes so hyperbolic as to seem artificial, and in the middle, where gender boundaries become ambiguous and androgyny reigns.

That means camp can also be hypermasculine. Wojcik points to the 1950s Hollywood leading man Victor Mature  whom the film critic David Thomson once described as “an incredible concoction of beef steak, husky voice, and brilliantine” and to Arnold Schwarzenegger as examples of masculine camp: Their personas are all muscle and sinew, masculinity as nothing but dudes punching other dudes.

At this year’s Met Gala, we saw masculine camp in the shirtless muscle men who carried a gold-clad Billy Porter to the pink carpet. The move referenced Mae West’s Vegas act, which opened with West being carried in by a pack of shirtless muscle men, thereby “drawing attention to their hyperbolic masculinity at the same time as her performance of femininity,” explains Wojcik.

Ann Mumbi

An expert in style and image, Fashion Addict focuses on brands worn by showbiz stars who have large numbers of fans worldwide Member Of #NairobiFashionHub Team

Ann Mumbi

An expert in style and image, Fashion Addict focuses on brands worn by showbiz stars who have large numbers of fans worldwide Member Of #NairobiFashionHub Team

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