For this year’s exhibition, Andrew Bolton—Wendy Yu Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute—drew on Susan Sontag’s seminal 1964 essay, “Notes on ‘Camp’.” The essay describes a sensibility marked by performance, excess, and a kind of winking bad taste, exemplified by figures like Oscar Wilde and outré aesthetic movements such as Art Nouveau. Among the pieces on display will be dazzling looks from Off-White, Schiaparelli, Moschino, Dior, Thom Browne, and lots more.

The invitation called for “Studied Triviality,” a phrase borrowed from a quote by Wilde. In a 1895 interview, the poet and playwright described his camp masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest as “exquisitely trivial, a delicate bubble of fancy, and it has its philosophy. . . . That we should treat all the trivial things of life very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.”