I didn’t watch the Oscars this year (I never do, so it’s really no surprise), so I get all of my information about the winners, the outfits, and the drama (or lack thereof) from Instagram and TikTok. This year, however, I noticed something in the flurry of interviews, posts, and pictures—the menswear was just plain boring.
If you look at every photo in this post, they are almost identical. What happened to the creativity of menswear? I’m upset about this backward step in fashion, after nearly all of these men have had stellar looks in the past, so why now are they just wearing a black tux? I want to attempt to break down the gender stereotypes that factor into award shows/red carpets, and how men’s fashion reflects their desire to showcase their talents, while simultaneously supporting the ideas of patriarchal success and superiority.
But just a quick note before I go on, though: I only want to talk about menswear here, because I think women’s fashion gets shit on enough as is, but also because I feel female celebrities often have more pressure placed upon them to show up and look great every. single. time. And, to wear something different every. single. time. Not just recycle the old black tux, but put thought and heart into their looks. So, I’m not going to rip into any of the ladies that attended the Oscars; they looked great.1
In order to get to the heart of my argument here, I want to use Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay Notes on Camp. I’ve linked a PDF file for the intrepid among you who have not already looked at this piece, but if you stay up to date in fashion and celebrity worlds, you’ll already know a bit about it: it was the theme for the 2019 Met Gala. “Camp” is defined by Sontag as “a mode of aestheticism,” but the “essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” And, if you recall some of the menswear looks from the Met Gala, they were just that: exaggerated. Remember Jared Leto carrying his own head? Or Billy Porter being carried in on a throne by six shirtless men?2 In my opinion, male celebrity fashion (as a collective) has never pushed the bounds of gender as much as it did at this Met Gala. That’s one of the defining features of Camp, according to Sontag. She states in note nine that one of the most attractive parts of Camp resides within its androgyny. “What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine.” This is one of my core beliefs, especially when it comes to fashion.
There is no need for a strict boundaries in clothing. It is literally just fabric that we put onto our bodies, so why does it need to be gendered? Throughout all of history, fashion has been painful, but especially so for women (think about corsets alone!). This isn’t to say there is a level of pain involved in historical menswear, but it never changed as drastically in such short periods of time.
This is just a silly little example that I googled for a visualization, but as you can see, the formula is the same. Shirt, pants, hat, jacket, shoes. There is no level of Campiness involved. And, formal menswear is even duller and unchanging. It’s always been just a tuxedo and tie. Maybe a fun shoe if you're lucky. These relatively unchanging fashion “rules” were set in place by a patriarchal society, one that believed women are frivolous and fanciful, while men should be simple, powerful, and successful, and that their clothing should reflect that.
The Oscars last night showed an astounding step backward into this world of fashion rules and laws, of women dressing extravagantly, while men put on their power suits. Not all, of course, as there were some men not in simple black tuxes. Take Donald Glover at the afterparty, or Harry Shum Jr., for example. I would classify their looks as pretty Camp. But they aren’t the ones that I noticed. I noticed the normalcy. After the 2019 Met Gala, I saw just how far some designers and stylists were able and willing to push their creative limits, and since then, we have seen some phenomenal menswear looks on red carpets, proving that a sense of formal Campiness is possible to be achieved. So why not now? Those same designers and stylists are leaning on their crutch of past fashion expectations, hoping that it will deem success in the same way it has before. Another aspect of Camp, Sontag points out in note forty-six, is that “Camp taste transcends the nausea of the replica.” To be truly Camp is to not repeat what has been done before, and to go outside of a comfort zone.
Jamie Lee Curtis made a point last night in her acceptance speech about getting rid of the division between male and female award categories, which is a whole other essay I could write. There are some categories that are, by design, already genderless. Take a look at this graph that shows the gender distribution of Academy Award nominees in 2023. Men were more likely to be nominated in these categories than women, and these are intended to be genderless!
Even Jimmy Kimmel, the host of the Oscars, joked that it was “so white and so male.” The patriarchal effects on award shows have not gone away, and I suspect they won’t for some time. Wearing a tuxedo with a little heeled boot (I’m looking at you, Austin Butler) isn’t doing all that much to combat the normalcy of the prejudice that is prevalent throughout award season. This brings me to my final point about Camp: Camp is a commentary on one’s internal character through an external display of values. There is a sense of breaking free from traditionalism, and fighting back that encapsulates Sontag’s writing because what you wear truly does reflect the kind of person that you are, or choose to be. Wearing stereotypically gendered clothing shows that you are willing to conform to a stereotypically gendered scenario, especially if it benefits you in some way. Now, I understand that there is a complexity to what a celebrity wears; it has to go through a stylist and a designer and there are a lot of hoops to jump through before it makes it onto the red carpet, but that also means that there are a lot of people who greenlighted the decision to conform.
I’m not an expert on this by any means; I’m just a teenage girl who reads into things (a little too much sometimes), but I do think that if we all start to incorporate a bit of Campiness into our lives, we could be happier. I’ll leave you with one of Sontag’s closing remarks (note fifty-six) from Notes on Camp: “Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of “character.” …Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as “a camp,” they’re enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling.”
I linked all of my sources where they showed up, but if you want to look into the idea of Camp a little more, I suggest this Time article.
As far as a recommendation goes, some of the only reading I’ve done lately has been for class or purely for pleasure, but if you want to go read Dante’s Inferno, be my guest. I will suggest, however, one of Haruki Murakami’s short stories called “The Second Bakery Attack,” which you can read the full text of here.
If you want to look at all of the Oscars looks from last night, here is the official Vogue article showcasing 189 of them!