An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has as its seed an old magazine piece that looked at what it meant to be camp

"The hallmark of camp is the spirit of extravagance," the American writer and political activist Susan Sontag wrote in her first major essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964. "Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers."

Fashion aficionados who have queued up for a long time outside the gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York are guaranteed a close-up view of "three million feathers" in the form of a pink Cristobal Balenciaga gown from the Spanish fashion designer's autumn/winter 1965-66 collection.

With pink ostrich features sprouting all over the floor-reaching pink tulle dress and contrasting in terms of volume with a waist-cinching satin sash, the saccharine concoction provided a perfect footnote - this is perhaps not the intention of the designer - to Sontag's essay merely one year after its publication.

And more than half a century after Sontag's famous take on camp, a cultural phenomenon that is admittedly beyond definition, Andrew Bolton, the head curator of the Met's Costume Institute, has mustered an equally courageous effort - a visual feast of an exhibition with a title that pays tribute to his witty muse Camp: Notes on Fashion.

As part of the show, the Balenciaga gown, intended for a socialite of his time, has joined a Dior evening dress of silk taffeta, a Thierry Mugler "Venus" ensemble and a Versace jumpsuit glistening with bead and crystal embroideries of Vogue magazine covers.

The unlikely juxtaposition of the supremely elegant (as in Balenciaga and Dior) with the vociferously subversive (as in Mugler and Versace) gives a hint of the inbuilt dichotomy of camp, and of what Sontag describes as "naive camp" versus "deliberate camp".

"One must distinguish between naive and deliberate camp. Pure camp is always naive. Camp which knows itself to be camp ("camping") is usually less satisfying," Sontag wrote. In other words, while the alltoo-serious endeavor of Balenciaga to create the divine dress for a high-society lady resulted in a piece of genuine, naive camp, Mugler's deliciously over-the-top sartorial rendition of an open oyster shell, from which the female body would arise, constitutes calculated camp.

In the exhibition, the Mugler piece, featuring a giant teardrop faux pearl where the navel is, is budding exuberantly right beside an equally stunning but much more demure creation by Balenciaga, whereby the ruffled silk lining is revealed by the flaring bottom of the dress.

Viewed together, it seems that Mugler has taken the shape of the Balenciaga dress and turned it upside down. This idea of reversal was embraced by the Dutch design duo Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren, known for mounting theatrical and performative runway shows with avant-garde fashions. Their 2006 creation - a silk taffeta dress displayed alongside a similarly colored tulle confection from Lanvin's 1956 collection - has sought to play up the concept instead of mitigating it.

Playfulness that winked at the past - that is the emotional thread of the exhibition. In fact, like the two chains that coil around each other to form a double helix carrying genetic information, camp has in its DNA the twin forces of fashion and historicism - fashion that has ambition in its heart, and historicism that guaranteed the "necessary detachment" to fully relish a fantasy.

It is very true of Versailles, the principal royal residence for the French monarchs between 1682 and 1789, an era that Sontag believes marked the height of camp.

"Camp art is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content," she wrote in the article. Versailles, ambitiously envisioned and passionately realized, seemed to have complied with every standard set up by the critic who also remarked that "what is extravagant in an inconsistent or unpassionate way is not camp."

The gilded palace was built by Louis XIV (1638-1715), the Sun King who, as a great lover of excessiveness and exaggeration, has been given prime place in the first section of the exhibition, dealing mainly with the amorphous history of camp. (It is worth noting that Sontag cited both Pope and Chinoiseries - the latter style had also found its way in Versailles - as examples of camp. In light of that opinion, the Met's 2015 fashion exhibition China Through the Looking Glass and the 2018 Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination are both inextricably linked to the current one, by providing it with more astounding examples.)

On view is the best-known Louis XIV portrait, executed by the French baroque painter Hyacinth Rigaud (1659-1743).

While the sizable wig and the voluminous velvet cape all shout camp, equally unignorable are his white leather shoes, with square toes and scarlet soles. The shoes, as well as the pair of long legs extending from them, were a nod to the king's training in ballet, a stylized form of art that Sontag believes is saturated camp, just like opera.

"That way, the way of camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization," Sontag wrote.

It is not surprising to know that the king's close circle is populated with men who camped indefatigably. (The word "camp" derives from the French se camper, meaning to flaunt or to pose.)

One of them is the king's brother Philippe I (1640-1701), also known as "Monsieur". Raised never to become a threat to his brother, Philippe, who was no less a dancer than the king, was encouraged as a young man to wear women's clothes by their mother, who was believed to have nicknamed him "my little girl".

Another is the less noble yet more notable Chevalier d'Eon (1728-1810), a French diplomat and spy who appeared publicly as a man for the first 49 years of his life and then as a woman for the remaining 33 years of it. While he was in London on exile, a betting pool was started on the London Stock Exchange about his true sex. Later, when he was finally allowed to return to France, King Louis XVI, whose father d'Eon had famously attempted to blackmail with the secret diplomatic letters in his hands, offered him a sum that included funds for a new wardrobe of women's clothes.

In their remarkable lives, both men had embraced contradiction. Open about his homosexuality, Philippe married twice and fathered seven children who were future kings and queens, a fact that led him to be called "the grandfather of Europe". Moreover, acting effeminately did not stop him from establishing himself as a successful military commander during the War of Devolution in 1667 and the Battle of Cassel in 1677. (After Philippe died, his great grandson sold his Saint Cloud estate to Marie Antoinette, the hapless last queen of France before the French Revolution and the queen of camp thanks to Sofia Coppola's 2006 namesake movie.)

A master fencer, d'Eon, whose name was given to the coinage of the word eonism, also volunteered for the battleground even as a "female", asking to lead a division of female soldiers against the Habsburgs in 1672.

Put simply, both men were androgynous. Sontag, in her 1964 article, wrote about the androgyne as "one of the greatest images of camp sensibilities". "Camp taste draws on a mostly unacknowledged truth of taste: the most refined form of sexual attractiveness (as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure) consists in going against the grain of one's sex," she wrote. "What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine."

Sontag, fiercely intelligent with a strong personality, could be rightly viewed as embodying that fatal female attractiveness veiled with masculinity. In one part of the exhibition where the critic's original scripts are on display, visitors are reminded by the constant sound of tapping of a woman who sat in front of the typewriter, cigarette in mouth, trying to enunciate on a sensibility that she was both "drawn to" and "offended by".

From this point on, the exhibition plunges into the subculture of cross-dressers, transvestites and gay. "In the 19th century, what has been distributed throughout all of high culture now becomes a special taste. It takes on overtones of the acute, the esoteric, the perverse," wrote Sontag.

Inextricably linked to these emerging concepts is the image of the camp dandy, the 19th century equivalent of the effeminate aristocrat, and a stereotype exemplified by the Anglo-Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde.

Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversational skills, Wilde was a spokesman for aestheticism, an intellectual and art movement that supported the emphasis of aesthetic values more than social-political themes for art and literature. Being tried for gross indecency with men, Wilde was imprisoned for years before suffering a young death at the age of 40.

By all accounts, the aesthete provided an ideal case study for Sontag, who tried to theorize the link between camp and homosexuality.

"Not all homosexuals have camp taste," she wrote. "But homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard - and the most articulate audience - of camp. Every sensibility is self-serving to the group that promotes it. ... Homosexuals have pinned their integration into society on promoting the aesthetic sense."

Fashions inspired by him include an Alessandro Michele ensemble for Gucci, in which the designer grafted the jacket of a tailcoat with the skirt of a frock coat for gender-bending effects.

However, one would be wrong to assume that the entire exhibition has more or less been usurped by gay men. After going through winding spaces, the show finally flooded into a 200-sqm exhibition hall in which clothing is displayed in double-decker cases that enhanced the soaring, theatrical feel for exhibits appearing on the top, above eye level.

The display cases are arranged along the wall in a near-circular form, perhaps to echo the curator who, at a media preview, quoted the cultural historian Andy Medhurst: "Trying to define camp is like attempting to sit in the corner of a circular room."

But people have tried repeatedly nonetheless. The center of the exhibition hall is taken over by high-fashion accessories which, through "converting the serious into the frivolous", to use Sontag's words, have aligned themselves with the humor of camp.

These include a cauliflower headpiece by the British designer Deirdre Hawken, whose green swirling leaves and white curd are immaculately realized by silk satin and chiffon, as well as by hundreds of tiny synthetic pearl beads. Beside it are the words of Jack Babuscio: "Camp aims to transform the ordinary into something more spectacular."

This total erasure of the line between the high and the low, the serious and the frivolous has not only endeared camp with pop culture (On view is also a dress printed with Warhol's famous Campbell's tomato soup tin), but also inserted in its heart the spirit of democracy.

"The experience of camp is based on the great discovery that the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly upon refinement," Sontag wrote.

While the French in effect invented camp with a flourish and a flight of imagination, the British, with their signature waywardness, abducted camp and initiated it to the underside of culture. Yet with the advent of pop culture and the resulting dethronement of high art, camp was back to the mainstream, whose acid sweetness has put smiles on more than a few faces.

"To perceive camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role," Sontag wrote in her 1964 article. "It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater."

If life is indeed theater it's not too bad to make an entree in a dress of millions feathers.