Welcome to Camp 80
"artifice, frivolity, naïve middle-class pretentiousness, and shocking excess"
Welcome to Camp 80.
This is a love letter to the genre, high art, and identity of camp in film, television, and music.
Wikipedia’s definition of camp is pretty straightforward “Camp is an aesthetic style and sensibility that regards something as appealing because of its bad taste and ironic value”
I was born in 1980 in the middle of an explosion of bad taste and ironic value. With the spirited and hedonistic days of the 70s in the collective rearview, I entered a decade where amplification of excess and conspicuous consumption made life a smorgasbord in which being constantly engorged was not unusual.
It isn’t lost on me that much of this media was dismissed, debased, and discarded. What’s left behind inspires many of what we embrace and cling towards today. Schitt’s Creek didn’t sweep the Emmy’s on a whim. Zendaya and her charmingly savage castmembers helped Euphoria take center-stage this year and earn her first Emmy award.
Even 40 years later, we witness the remnants of camp in everything from the White House to the Kardashians. For better or worse, the impact of gaudy excess has provided a new economy and has allowed many to conquer a niche frontier.
2020 is camp. We are camp.
Thierry Mugler calls camp “freedom and fun mental health”. And that is what this newsletter will tackle. It’s influence in our culture, what got us here and what emotions are conjured from it.
-wynter
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