Camp / Campy

Camp is an aesthetic sensibility that delights in exaggeration, artifice, theatricality, and irony, treating the extravagant and the over-serious as sources of pleasure. Susan Sontag brought the idea into mainstream conversation with her 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp'," describing it as a love of the unnatural, of style over content, and of things that are "too much." Camp has deep roots in LGBTQ+ culture, where a shared appreciation for glamour, melodrama, and the beautiful failure of seriousness offered a coded language and a form of joy. It shapes drag, ballroom, fashion, and film, and the 2019 Met Gala theme "Camp: Notes on Fashion" showed how central it remains. To call something "campy" points to that knowing, playful excess.