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CAMP

visual research

essay

photoshoot

materials and techniques

This project is a student project at the School of Design or a research project at the School of Design. This project is not commercial and serves educational purposes

In a time where everyone is leaning towards right wing, «clean girl» aesthetic takes over the world and Pantone chooses «Cloud Dancer» as the color of 2026, it’s more important than ever to have fun and express yourself without taking anything seriously.

The global mood board has flattened beige linen, soft blush gloss and the marketed fantasy of effortless perfection, and yet beneath this polished minimalism, another aesthetic waits. The one that refuses to whisper. Camp, with all its artifice and exaggerated beauty, steps in as a reminder that art is not a moral duty. Sometimes, art is simply style for style’s sake, sometimes the brightest truth hides behind the most theatrical mask. Camp is not a chaos, nor is it a randomness, it is a highly intentional embrace of exaggeration. Susan Sontag once described it as «the love of unnatural» [1], the passion for what reveals its own construction. Camp is a way of seeing life as a performance, where sincerity and irony dance so closely together you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. It restores humanity through humor, spectacle and self-awareness.

Josef Jasso, Amanda Lepore, 2018

You can feel this energy in Dalí’s Mae West Lips Sofa, an object that insists furniture has no obligation to behave. While Bauhaus chairs sit in disciplined silence, all tubular steel and rational purity, Dalí instead gives us a pair of crimson lips, plush and impractical, as if whispering: Function is optional. Drama is not. It’s a piece that doesn’t serve the body as much as it serves the imagination. In today’s culture, where design is treated almost like religion, this sofa becomes a relic of joyful disobedience, a reminder that an object can exist simply to charm.

Salvador Dalí, Mae West Lips Sofaí, 1937 Hynek Gottwald, Bauhaus Chrome Sofa, 1930's

That same spirit animates the cinematic hysteria of «Whatever happened to baby Jane?». The film’s decaying Hollywood glamour and grotesque performances turn tragedy into spectacle and melodrama into art. Nothing in this movie is subtle. Its theatrical exaggeration feels like the antidote to the quiet luxury of contemporary visual culture, Its campiness is not an accident — it’s a survival strategy, transforming pain into performance, fear into feather boa and heartbreak into eyeliner.

In sculpture, camp takes on new textures. Lynda Benglis’s latex and beeswax works, with their glossy surfaces and overflowing forms, perform an intentional rebellion against minimalism’s strict diet of right angles and self-restraint. Her pieces glisten like something alive, something humid, something that resists categorization. They spill, ooze and seduce. They are proof that excess can be a form of liberation, a reminder that the world, in all its heaviness, becomes lighter when art is allowed to misbehave.

Lynda Benglis, Lynda Benglis: Water Sources, 2015

Meanwhile, contemporary photography has given camp a new face in the work of David LaChapelle, who turns the camera into a cathedral of color. His images are drenched in hyper-saturated tones and sucandy-coated surrealism. It makes realism almost unnecessary. In a LaChapelle’s universe, everything is brighter, slicker, shinier, louder and glamorous to the point of absurdity, but always with a beating heart underneath. His work is a reminder for us that artificiality can be more honest than authenticity, because at least the artificial doesn’t pretend.

David LaChapelle, Jesus is my homeboy, 2003

And then there is the infamous meat dress worn by Lady Gaga, perhaps the most instantly recognizable camp moment of the 21st century. Raw beef arranged into couture, worn under the hottest stage lights, transformed a red carpet into a performance about spectacle, identity and the body as a tool for provocation. It was ridiculous, uncomfortable, unforgettable — a refusal to disappear into minimalistic prettiness. It embraced the weird, the extreme, the dramatic, the humorous. It said everything without trying to say anything at all. That is the essence of camp.

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Lady Gaga & Franc Fernandez, The Meat Dress, 2010

Camp thrives whenever the world feels too heavy, too polished or too optimized. It offers relief through exaggeration, joy through excess and clarity trough theatricality. In a moment where aesthetics are policed by algorithms and trends last shorter than one season, camp is the final frontier of true freedom. It reminds us that the world is already an absurd place, so we might as well participate intentionally.

Camp is a love letter to the unnecessary. A celebration of artifice. A refusal to shrink. Something so unnatural, yet so alive.

Bibliography

Sontag S. Notes on Camp. 1964.

Mason C. «Camp Is Not Just Fashion — It’s Design Too?» Online resource. URL: https://www.christopher-mason.com/journalism-articles/2019/5/6/camp-is-not-just-fashionits-design-too | Accessed: 08.12.2025

«Campy Art?» Artsper Blog. Online resource. URL: https://blog.artsper.com/en/a-closer-look/contemporary-art/campy-art | Accessed: 08.12.2025

Image sources

Show

https://i1.wp.com/posturemag.com/online/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Amanda-Lepore-1.jpg?resize=1211%2C1500 (Accessed: 10.12.2025)

https://vkvideo.ru/video210082629_456239167 (Accessed: 10.12.2025)

https://miro.medium.com/v2/0*c7ZBCogrMknCBPgm.jpg (Accessed: 10.12.2025)

https://www.celebrity-cutouts.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/amanda-lepore-fringe.jpg (Accessed: 10.12.2025)

https://luxurylondon.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Salvador-Dalí-Mae-West-Lips-sofa-1938.jpg (Accessed: 10.12.2025)