Camp is Dead and We Killed It
Image Courtesy: @karlieklossw via Instagram
Camp was once a subversive, niche aesthetic—intentionally using performance, exaggeration, and irony. It thrived in queer spaces, underground film, and avant-garde fashion. It was drag queens and John Waters films; it was Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp. It was deliberate, a way to mock convention while reveling in its theatrics. But today, on social media, “camp” has been flattened into a catch-all term to describe anything weird, loud, or unconventional. If a celebrity wears a bad outfit? Camp. If a movie has bad CGI? Camp. Somehow, everything is camp, which means nothing really is.
The internet thrives on extremes, so social media has turned anything slightly unusual into something iconic, groundbreaking, or camp. It’s the neverending tendency to turn complex ideas into simple trends.
Image Courtesy: Teen Vogue
Take the 2019 Met Gala with Camp: Notes on Fashion as its theme. It should’ve been a celebration of camp’s extravagant, self-aware nature, but instead, it became a test of social media’s ability to recognize camp in the first place. People debated whether each outfit was truly camp, often using the term to describe any over-the-top outfit. The result? Camp was no longer a countercultural force; it was just another mainstream trend that could be misunderstood and eventually forgotten like any other viral moment. Celebrities arrived in incredible, avant-garde outfits, but it can be argued that only a few truly embodied camp’s irony and playfulness. If camp is being “extra,” it becomes difficult to distinguish it from high fashion or theatricality. The problem with calling everything camp is that it strips away the intentionality behind the aesthetic. It isn’t just about being excessive; it’s about being excessive with a wink and pushing boundaries in a self-aware way deeply rooted in subversion.
Image Courtesy: Xtra
Calling a bad movie camp doesn’t make it camp; calling a crazy outfit camp doesn’t mean it’s actually playing with the structures of taste and high art. When camp is used as a quick description for anything different, it loses its edge. Think about all those movies marketed as “so bad they’re good.” Films like Cats (2019) and Morbius (2022) were unintentional disasters that audiences ended up labeling as camp in a joking way. Although this is just fun and overall pretty unharmful, comparing this to something like The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), which deliberately plays with camp’s theatricality and absurdity, might take away from its artistry and importance.
Image Courtesy: Amazon
In an era where brands market themselves as “quirky” and celebrities pretend to be overly eccentric for headlines, camp’s rebellious spirit has been repackaged as a trend. Rather than challenging mainstream culture, camp has been absorbed into it.
So where does that leave us? If camp is dead, can it be revived? Not every over-the-top outfit is camp, not every bad movie is camp, and not every eccentricity is avant-garde. Some things are just loud, just weird, just bad. And that’s okay. Let’s just stop calling it camp.
Strike Out,
Writer: Daniela Mendoza
Editor: Layne Schulte
Tallahassee