Inside fashion’s party of the year: night of a thousand stars, stylists and a couture cheeseburger.
Sometime before sunset, as a crowd of spectators watched from behind barricades across the street, six shirtless musclebound men hoisted a velvet divan onto their shoulders. Lady Gaga had performed a kind of high-art striptease, doffing gown after gown until she reached her fourth and final outfit, but already the next performance was set to begin.
On the couch reclined what appeared to be a golden idol, regal in repose. It was, in a way: Billy Porter, an actor who understands the opportunity afforded by an occasion — thus the entourage.
The hunks lowered him to the ground, and he stepped off, spread his golden wings and posed for the crowd, which roared. Then he ascended the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, carpeted in pink for the occasion, and plunged into the Met Gala, the fashion industry’s biggest party of the year.
The Met Gala is the annual fund-raiser for the Met’s Costume Institute, and tied to its spring exhibition. This year’s, “Camp: Notes on Fashion,” celebrates the pervasive influence of camp. It was up to the evening’s co-chairs — besides Gaga, Anna Wintour of Vogue, Alessandro Michele of Gucci, Serena Williams and Harry Styles — and their invited guests to make a case for the theme.
“The thing that I love is that this brings dignity back to the form,” Mr. Porter said. “Flamboyance, camp — most of the time, it’s a pejorative. This is a reclamation.”
He had reclaimed camp for himself in a look by the Blonds, a New York label, which sprang, Mr. Porter said, “out of Ryan Murphy saying to me I should do the entire five-outfit montage from ‘Mahogany.’” He’d settled for one.
Camp is tricky for fashion, which often is camp without understanding itself to be. Camp celebrates artifice and artificiality, flamboyance and theatricality, but can quickly deflate if forced.
It proved no less challenging for many of the guests, who came dressed as extravagant versions of themselves. “What is camp?” asked Celine Dion, who arrived in a beaded curtain of fringe by Oscar de la Renta and a peacock-feather headdress.
