SETTING UP CAMP

HEN ASKED IF I’D BE INTERESTED in writing a piece surrounding the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new Costume Institute exhibition “Camp: Notes on Fashion,” opening May 9, and its curator Andrew Bolton, I was sitting at a bar in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, during the city’s annual Carnaval festivities. I’ve since come to understand that Rio during Carnaval clocks in at a pretty high camp score: the feathery splendor, the street glitter, the costumed and sometimes satirical sex appeal. The hotel I was staying in—the Copacabana Palace—is very camp, both in name (it was never a palace) and in lore (it’s shot in a 1933 film called starring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire). And, while there, I saw the supermodels Caroline Trentini and Jhona Burjack dressed head-to-toe in Jean Paul Gaultier, the