Camp Vassar

I begin with a contradiction. Vassar is fashionable. But being fashionable is outdated. It seems as though being unfashionable on purpose is the style. Dresses over jeans. Soccer jerseys over ruffles. Things tied to our waists and in our hair. Either fifty layers or no clothes at all. It’s kitsch. It’s campy. It’s nonetheless Vassar. What is both the most stylish, in the very name of the word, is not stylish at all. What makes an outfit good is not its upholding of high-fashion values, but in its direct attack on taste. I should be clear: I do not mean that everything is ugly. Quite the contrary. However, I do think that things are bad. Intentionally. And it is in this bad-ness, a particular sect of camp, that we get the Vassar Camp.

As Susan Sontag writes in her manifesto Notes on Camp, “Pure camp is always naïve.” Vassar Camp, by definition, is also naive. Those who wear nightgowns over jeans do so with the intention of dressing well. Breaking all aesthetic rules on purpose. Yet just because one breaks rules does not make one stylish. It does however, make them camp. Vassar is full of rule breakers. We break stereotypes by being stereotypes. We shatter gender, class, and order. Feminine men. Masculine Women. Everyone in between. What is so camp is not our actual style, but the naive belief that we are the most stylish student body to ever exist. It is our own self confidence that is camp. The ability to walk in the quad in nothing but a sheer slip dress has nothing to do with truly breaking the grounds of fashion, but to break all the means of society. Our camp-ness stems not from good taste, but from inherently bad taste. Perhaps it is our youth, our c’est la vie attitude. But I believe it to be our naivité. It is no secret that we are a bubble. A nucleus of the intellectual elite. For many years, Vassar was a symbol of the bourgeois, well-behaved elite of America’s finest families. The Rockefellers, Roosevelts, Kennedys. Yet now we are a whore-house of queer thought, progressive ideas, and most importantly, we are pushing the boundaries of what it means to be an elite institution. And part of that is our style. I see it as a reaction against elitism. By breaking the rules of traditional tastes and aesthetics, we break the stereotype of the prudely rigid bourgeois. We have become a vestige of gayness. At Vassar, it is fashionable to be gay.

Sontag writes: “Not all homosexuals have Camp taste. But homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard –and the most articulate audience– of Camp.” By becoming a beacon of queer culture, Vassar is again breaking another one of its stereotypes. Queer culture plays a dominant part in Vassar’s culture. Today the two are inseparable. And we are camp. While it is not (most) of our intentions to be camp, we are whether we like it or not. Camp is built off of gay culture and BIPOC culture. And at a predominantly white institution that likes to pretend it is more progressive than it actually is, being kitsch, being tacky, being drab-

Our bad taste is what makes us happy. And that is camp. Vassar camp does not care what you look like. People do not care what you wear. You walk around campus with your nipples out, no one bats an eye. We are a utopia of fashion and disfashion. The models of NYFW co-exist with the grunge and the goth. Vassar camp is not a unified style. But a collage of everything, put together in a 1,000 acre campus. Perhaps it is a resistance against normalcy. Perhaps it is pure immaturity. But it is definitely our naivité that allows us to wear what ever the fuck we wear, and think we look good. It is our undeniable awfulness that makes us camp. Vassar camp is awful. That is the point. Good style is to have no style at all but to be confident in what you are wearing. “It’s good because it is awful” concludes Susan Sontag. And I conclude with this: by, is Vassar Camp. A man wearing a dress is not camp. It is intentional. Wearing a soccer jersey and a crochet skirt and thinking that you have good style, that is camp. It is our naive self confidence that we are at the forefront of style that makes us camp. By no means am I saying to stop doing these things. I’m not going to tell you what to wear, and regardless no one would listen to me even if I did.

It’s not camp because it’s ugly. It’s camp because you think it looks good.

But we are a stereotype of ourselves. And that is camp.