In 1992, a new family with five children moved into our street. Growing up with two brothers, I was excited to hear that there were two other girls in the household. Upon meeting them and surveying their rooms, I marvelled at their toy collections: they had all the Barbie stuff my dreams, but not my room, were made of: a pink mobile home, a convertible car, a Barbie house and several Barbie horses. One doll however, struck me as the most exotic, incredible and most beautiful creature: it was the 1992 Totally Hair Barbie, designed by Carol Spencer. She had a mini dress in fluorescent Pucci-style print, and her extremely long, floor-grazing locks were permanently crimped and came with hair gel. That day, I started a campaign with my parents to obtain a Totally Hair Barbie, even though up till then I’d only had a few basic dolls, one Skipper and many hand-me-down Barbies, since my green-party parents were not very enthusiastic about the American ‘teenage fashion model’ with pink plastic accoutrements. Once I got one, the best thing to do was go over to my neighbours’ house, where two of those dolls lived with the two girls, and add mine to their pair, so we could play with a Total Hair extravaganza set of three dolls, twisting the different strands and braid them together in a sort of octopus-like hair situation.

*

Carol Spencer: In those days, Pucci was all over the stores in the USA, and I mocked up the dress by glueing separate Pucci-print-shapes onto a small scale model, because it was right before the time when I learned to do this on the computer, and we made custom prints. At Mattel, we could not source fabrics with a print small and legible enough for the doll so the print fabric had to be created from scratch.  I just came back from a time living as an expat in Hong Kong working for Mattel’s Design Studio (1988-92), and wanted to prove my seniority to the design team in LA. There was a rigorous process of approving designs, going through many different departments at the company, and I ‘sold’ the marketing department the idea of dressing Barbie as a sort of Eve in her long, crimped hair, with a short dress to set off the length of the hair, and they approved. Then I had to talk to the engineers, because apart from marketing and aesthetics, every Barbie doll was also a technical feat. Our chem lab had just gotten a call from Japan that the factory who could make the special permanently-crimped hair feature was involved in a tragedy with a helicopter crash on Mount Fuji, so we had to find a back-up company and found one in Georgia. At the board meeting, one of our directors suggested the doll came with real ‘Dep’ hair gel. She became the best-selling Barbie of all time.

Introduced in 1959, Barbie, the ‘teenage fashion model,’ was supposed to crystallise the quintessential Californian look and lifestyle. Mattel, headquartered in Los Angeles, conquered not only the American but the global market (and households) with the doll with signature pink clothing and blond hair. But what exactly would one understand as the ‘California’’ style?

CS: When I arrived in LA in 1963, the ‘California look’ was very trendy. I was from Minnesota, so for me it was very clearly different: it had to do with the temperate climate, the laidback coastal ‘surf’  lifestyle, and the presence of natural elements. The bright sunlight was mirrored in strong, bold colours and patterns. A few years before, the American pavilion at the Brussels World Fair had been very successful, showing fashions chosen by Vogue, from over sixty manufacturers from all over the USA, and these were linked to the sporty and modern Californian lifestyle in the public’s mind.

Indeed, in 1958 Vogue US April’s issue, dedicated to the Brussels World Fair (‘Fashion: Belgium 1958 — the land, the new world’s fair, and us — an on-the-spot report’), the fashions presented feature clean, modern lines, some jeans and bathing suits, as well as bohemian blanket-like dresses with capes, and summery polka dots, stripes and floral patterns make up the rows of miniature silhouette images. A plaid cotton bathing suit by Claire McCardell epitomises the ingenuous American mid-century modern style. Occasions for donning the looks are described as distinctly American: sports car meets, poolside parties, city luncheons, tennis games and deep country sweater dressing. The designer list ranges from Cole of California to Philip Hulitar, Mollie Parnis, Jane Derby, Ben Banack, Lilly Daché, Adele Simpson, and more illustrious names such as Arnold Scaasi, James Galanos, Bonnie Cashin, Tina Leser, Claire McCardell and the Brooks Brothers. The patriotic captions read as thus:

‘Most American look on two legs: jeans. Here, at home with a Western shirt.’ Levis

‘Chemise bathing suit and a cut you’d know automatically — American as they come.’ Claire McCardell

‘A tennis dress in white piqué, American classic for American figures.’ Cabana

‘Most American dress in the world: the shirtwaist. This is orange chiffon; afternoons, evenings.’ Talmack

‘Red, white, and still champion: ‘T-shirt’ knit. (50,000,000 dresses can’t be wrong)’ David Crystal.

‘American by choice — the people’s choice: Cardigan-suit idea. This, red and navy-blue Tweed.’ Davidow

‘At-home, slim silk pull-over and sharkskin pants, a touch of Americanitis in the pink.’ B.H. Wragge

*

Having trained and worked at different American fashion brands before, Carol now worked for Mattel in Los Angeles, making mood boards and mock-ups, prototypes and samples for Barbie, just like a normal fashion designer for adults would. I’m curious about what her fashion references were, and whether she visited trade or fashion shows like any other professional.

CS: The type of research I did,  and my day to day workday changed per decade, because technology changed. First, magazines were very important inspiration sources, especially for colour and trend reports, Women’s Wear Daily, California Apparel News. At Barbie we also embraced Mary Quant youth fashions when they came out. Then, everything ‘pop culture’ on TV: the program Style with Elsa Klench on CNN (1980-2001) was very important, and also, Charlie’s Angels in the 1970s-80s, Dynasty in the 1980s and Baywatch in the 1990s. All these programs influenced Barbie’s style. For the Malibu Barbie set, I would literally go sit on the Malibu shore and think of Malibu Barbie, Ken, Christie and Skipper, and ride horses with friends along the bluff. I  rewatched Gidget with Sandra Dee. Apart from these Californian inspirations, I also travelled widely to Europe in the 1970s, in order to watch people in the streets, and go to some fashion shows.

But was Barbie meant to be a trendsetter or a trend follower?

CS: We had to take into account a fashion that was understandable for a child, and remember that a doll came out one year and a half after designing her and a year after presenting her at the toy fair in Nurnberg. The outfit had to be at a certain point on the ‘fashion curve,’ right after the peak, when it came out. This meant that the market was well saturated with this type of look and the child would recognise the fashion. The play pattern was important, it had to appeal to a mainstream children’s audience. If Barbie was too fashionable or ahead in style, she would lose her appeal.

*

Mattel had started, like so many Californian corporate wonders, as a start-up with its founders Elliot and Ruth Handler selling picture frames from a garage. In the early years, the goal was to make the rigid plastic doll more life-like, such as through the introduction of bendable legs. Engineers from aerospace and ex-military technicians which had lingered in LA after the war,  flocked to Mattel, each with their own special skill. Charlotte Johnson was Barbie’s first fashion designer, she taught art history during the day, and designed for Barbie as an evening job. For Carol, too, it was hard to be taken seriously when she had to introduce herself to people as Barbie’s designer, which was not considered a serious profession. ‘It was just laughable,’ she told me. Carol was part of a four-people design team, which grew over the years into a thirty-people team. The group of four designers were always competing with each other to get their designs approved, and communicated with rapid mockups with engineers, for special features like the fabrics that changed colours underwater, and hair colours which changed with water application, already introduced in the 1970s. For the clothes, the designers had free creative reign, and had to make a pattern to be tried out with sample makers, and then adjust and finalise for production. The sewing of the miniature garments, made from fabrics sourced in Asia, was tested in different factories, and were eventually sent off to Japan, where dexterous teams sewing tiny clothes by hand obtained the best results. Each designer cut six sets of patterns for a design review meeting, and then the design would move through different meetings with marketing, children and parent feedback tests and more. All in all the process took up one year.

The in-house motto with regards to the social and physical evolution of the dolls, was ‘Barbie changes as we change.’ Usually, market research had to prove that there was a market for a new idea, and then that change would be approved. The first black doll ‘Christie’ came quite early, in 1968; she was a talking doll (‘You’ll never know what I’ll say next’) and introduced as a friend of Barbie’s. It took until 1980 for a black Barbie doll to be called ‘Barbie’ herself. Carol Spencer had to prove to Mattel it was time to add more dolls with different skin tones to the market: the Magic Curl Barbie Doll of 1981 was the first series of dolls which had a Caucasian, African American, and Hispanic type. Later in the 1980s, a Japanese Barbie doll was made by Mattel’s licensee Takara. This Caucasian doll was different from Barbie to better appeal to the Japanese customer: she had a closed mouth, was shorter in height and had large manga-style rounded eyes. ‘It was a very popular and cute doll but the license was broken and the doll was pulled, since the Japanese managers were somewhat old-fashioned: they did not like this westernized doll with Japanese look and wanted to uphold the ideal beauty of the Edo period.’

Even though Barbies were tested in various settings before being released, Carol learned a lot about desirability, societal norms and expectations from the feedback she got at live events: ‘At a convention in the 1990s, a grandmother once came up to me and asked, where are Barbie’s underpants?, which I thought was a good point, so I designed white lace briefs for My First Ballerina Barbie, together with molded-on ballet slippers and painted white tights, for convenient dressing. The most important thing was always that it had to be easy for a child to dress. Later, Barbie would get flesh coloured undies and permanently fixed underpants.’

Another change which came in the 1990s, was the addition of Chelsea (Kelly), a baby sister doll for Barbie. Barbie could not have a child out of wedlock with Ken, and had to remain eternally unmarried/single or it would stop the play pattern of identification for a young girl. Spencer had suggested that children needed more nurturing features, rather than just projection, so they would play longer with Barbie. Child testing had proven that children grew out of playing with Barbie by age 5-6, with kids starting to play with her as early as age 2.

In her private life, Carol Spencer had to navigate multiple roadblocks to do the type of creative professional work she wanted to pursue, rather than the five predetermined professions for most American women of her generation (teacher, nurse, secretary, shopgirl and seamstress). Spencer convinced the marketing team that Barbie could thus also be more than a nurse or teacher, and already in 1973, she created outfits for new professions: a flight attendant costume and an MD costume with an on-call pager phone. Later, she created Barbie’s astronaut suit, with aviation shoulder pads. As she told me,‘The play value of these professional costumes was high, it was not so much about the fashion. A child could relate to these professions, and that’s what was most important to me. Everything was child tested, and the problem was that children were fearful of space.’ So Carol’s racer suit and even pajamas for Barbie to wear in space were not commercially successful – instead, Barbie turned back to fantasy, in the form of 1980s glamour. The 1981 wedding of Princess Diana, the dramatic costumes of Dynasty, and the fashions of Claude Montana and Thierry Mugler all gave a new high fashion focus to Barbie’s wardrobe after the more sports-focused 1970s.

Carol, whose name started to appear on the boxes of her Barbie designs (a special honour and name credit not easily won) also started to travel more to adult conventions and Barbie fan meetings in the 1980s to sign her dolls, so she convinced the board to create Barbies especially for this growing adult market, which would spend more money and had different tastes than the children’s market. In the 1990s, Mattel had a line called ‘Great Era Barbies’ with historical and film costumes, for which Carol visited the LACMA museum’s collection to learn about period gowns. She designed a Sissi-gown and a Scarlett O’Hara-gown for Barbie, which became very popular with collectors. Barbie with clothes designed by ‘real’ fashion designers followed. The first fashion designer with his eponymous Barbie was Oscar de la Renta: ‘He could choose to either design the doll himself or approve one of our designs. Oscar approved my design, a high glamour, black with gold extravagant dress. He entered the room, nodded at those designs he liked, and left with no words.’  In 1994, Carol created one of her last collectible dolls, Benefit Ball Barbie, for the 35th anniversary of the doll. It was a golden extravaganza, with Carol’s name stamped not just on the box but on the doll in gold lettering. Her final creation before retirement, Café Society Barbie in 1998, wore an Art Deco inspired sheath dress in gold lurex lace over satin. A career which had started with pragmatic, sun-kissed American sportswear came to an end with couture-like, dramatic silhouettes.

Today, after decades of feminist and pedagogic criticisms of Barbie, one can find Barbie dolls in many different body types (petite, curvy, tall), various skin tones, Barbies with disabilities and Barbies with gender neutral professions (such as truck driver Barbie, game developer Barbie, vaccinologist Barbie, and of course, President Barbie). These have been welcome and necessary changes to the Caucasian blonde archetype with tiny waist and unnaturally long legs, which Barbie has represented to so many children and parents over the decades. According to Carol though, the elongated body was not just due to an impossible beauty ideal, but a pragmatic solution to technical and commercial issues: ‘You have to realise that with more diversity in body types, not all the clothes will fit the same Barbie anymore, so you will have to buy different sets. The design for Barbie always had to do with the right scale and the right fabrics, with clean seams and seam allowances, which were very difficult to execute in miniature garments. Often fabrics were too heavy or too thick for a small doll, especially when doubled at the seam. This is also why she has a tiny waist: because the skirt and shirt fabric meet in the middle part, when she lays flat for dressing, there’s often a double piece of fabric there. This is why the waist is smaller than normal, to make it appear normal under several layers of fabric. Then, because children could not fit sleeves on full, upward arms, the arms had to be hollowed out, so there would not be too much fabric at the sleeve inset. And yet another factor is artistic: the proportion of the doll was based on a figure sculpted by an artist, who used the ideal proportion of three heads to the waist, where a normal person is usually 2,5 heads to the waist. The eternal problem was that, even on a tall Barbie, even the smallest buttons were too big.’

*

A few years ago, I attended a seminar on fashion and disobedience in Santiago de Chile. One of the workshops was given by Maria Galindo, a Bolivian anarcho-feminist from the collective ‘Mujeres Creando.’ She made head dresses with the participants which deconstructed Latin stereotypes of femininity through tropes such as Carmen Miranda, exotic fruits  and Barbie dolls. The result of the workshop were joyous, colourful head dresses full of long-legged Barbie dolls, sticking out like totems of feminist salvation. Nothing more defiant than a carnavalesque headdress full of perky Barbie dolls. I looked through the various dolls on display and found, both to my adult relief and childish disappointment, no sign of Totally Hair Barbie amongst them.

Karen Van Godtsenhoven is a freelance curator and fashion researcher at Ghent University. She greatly enjoyed reading Carol Spencer’s book ‘Dressing Barbie.’

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

William Blake, The Tyger, 1794

*

The sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space

George Bataille, The Accursed Share, 1949

This article was originally published in Vestoj On Capital, available for purchase here.

1. G Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Vol. 1: Consumption, Zone Books, New York, London, 1988. ↩

2. Ibid., p.21. ↩

3. Ibid., p. 23. ↩

4. Ibid., p. 34. ↩

5. Ibid., p. 35. ↩

6. P Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. R. Nice, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 1984 ↩

7. https://twitter.com/KimKardashian, on February 19, 2019 ↩

8. G Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Vol. 1: Consumption, Zone Books, New York, London, 1988.  ↩

Oh, but if I quit my job it’s not disturbing
I’d use very often a liter of bourbon
‘Cause I can sit and in one minute eat my turban
And still make my money with my bananas

– Carmen Miranda

‘Nothing subverts the straight like excess.’

– Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

IN RIO DE JANEIRO, a collection of more than four hundred headdresses, brassieres, platform shoes, costume jewellery, shoulder flounces, skirts and spencers from Carmen Miranda’s extravagant exotic wardrobe are waiting to be moved from the small Carmen Miranda Museum in the Flamengo neighbourhood to the shiny, newly built and in-progress Museum of Moving Image, conceived of as a vertical boulevard echoing Rio’s sinuous sidewalks. Forty-two garments will be exhibited in the new museum’s section ‘Los Tropismos,’ focused on the iterations of the artistic Tropicalísmo movement from the 1960s, which fused avant-garde with popular and indigenous cultures. Miranda, born in Portugal in 1909 and whose brief life span ended abruptly in 1955, could be seen as a precursor to this movement, using camp and counter-appropriation techniques in a world which, on the one hand, would only allow her to exist as a tropical caricature, and, on the other, was not ready (yet) to engage intellectually with her popularisation of ‘lower class’ music (samba) and Bahian cultural identity and aesthetic, which were seen as vulgar, low class and ‘too black,’ and therefore not suitable for export during Brazil’s nationalistic awakening in the 1930s. Interestingly, during the same decade Carmen Miranda was also the muse and mascot of Theodore Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy towards South America, which stated that the US would not interfere with the domestic affairs of Latin America. As a cross-cultural political symbol of art and commerce she is still a contested figure, sometimes seen as something akin to an imperialist emblem intended to carry on influencing how Latin America is portrayed in the world.

To the layer of her constructed, transracial Brazilian identity, Miranda added pan-South American garments like flamenco skirts and flounced blouses, resulting in an exotic cornucopia of Latinidade. ((Latinidade is Portuguese for the Spanish word Latinidad, the Latin cultural identity.)) It is an enduring, clichéd image which Chilean designers and founders of the collective Las Malvestidas Tamara Poblete and Loreto Martinez see ‘as a paradigm of the cultural appropriation and exoticisation of “the Latin feminine” that offers a bleached, sanitised, homogenous, festive Latin America free of conflicts.’¹

I would like to argue however that, even though at first sight Miranda reinforces cultural stereotypes and ‘Tutti Frutti’ tropes, she uses camp through her dress, mannerisms, gesture and speech as a way to destabilise and undercut hierarchies of class, race and sexuality, and shows this through what scholar Kathryn Bishop-Sanchez calls the ‘performative wink,’ her redirecting of the camera’s gaze with a knowing smile.² Carmen Miranda’s dress and gestural language are an example of Latin carnivalesque³ in which she ‘camps’ the Afro-Brazilian identity of Bahian women as well as Latin femininity. It is true that, given the era she lived in (Hollywood’s Golden Age, during the Hays Code and pre-Stonewall), her transgression is a sanitised one; a camp (and hence, also closeted) performative strategy was the only means at her disposal.

Post 1952, Miranda would dress in Orientalist garments, jewellery and turbans, designed by Bruce Roberts, thereby Othering herself for a third time. Her Orientalism is not serious (as in Susan Sontag’s example of the serious Orientalist who calls out, ‘Voilà: the Orient’), but rather a humorous vehicle for self-expression in a restricted setting. Miranda’s camping tools were her body and her body language as well as her outlandish costumes: material testimonies of a life lived in Technicolor. Carmen’s lines in the ‘The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat’ convey the camp and queer sensibility she so often expressed through her clothing: ‘Some people say I dress too gay/ But every day I feel so gay/ And when I’m gay I dress that way/ Something wrong with that?’

At the Carmen Miranda museum, the stage costumes’ ephemeral quality, often made of cheap and artificial materials, causes conservation challenges: the plastic sequins and acrylic pearls on the papier-maché pears, pineapples, grapes and bananas are rapidly degrading; the garments, which have been altered many times to adapt to the movement of her performances and to fit her changing body shape, are fragile relics of a non-stop life on stage.

The headdresses, even though their authorship is uncertain, were known to be modified and customised by Miranda: as such they are symbols of her own (limited) creative agency and skilled craftsmanship, having started out in a millinery shop when she was a poor young girl coming out of the convent where she was educated by nuns (in a biographical turn similar to Gabrielle Chanel’s). In 1948, a TV journalist called Miranda’s outfit ‘the Brazilian New Look,’ an adulatory expression which highlights the difference between Paris and the Tropics, but which also captures the highly fashionable status of Miranda’s creations. Miranda ironically comments on the labour captured in wearing the outfits and playing ‘Carmen Miranda’ in the song ‘Bananas is My Business’: ‘I’d love to wear my hair like Deanna Durbin/ But I have to stuff it in a turban/ A turban that weighs five thousand tons/ forty-four and one-half pounds/ And besides that I have to wear those crazy gowns.’ As her biographer describes, Miranda would often undo her costume or take her Ferragamo platform shoes off on stage to show the artificiality of her image and unveil the self-parody, to which she was limited by the studio bosses. ‘Successful Camp,’ writes Sontag in her oft-quoted essay on the topic, ‘even when it reveals self-parody, reeks of self-love.’ Miranda’s highest form of self-parody happens in ‘Copacabana,’ when she wears a twenty-four pound chandelier turban, capturing the performative, humorous mode at the centre of camp: ‘Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a “lamp”; not a woman, but a “woman.”’⁴

A similar type of Latin carnivalesque camp can be found in the work of Dominican actress Maria Montez. Montez, dubbed the Queen of Technicolor in the 1940s, inspired Jack Smith’s exotic camp phantasmagoria Flaming Creatures and Susan Sontag’s writings on Jack Smith and Montez, even leading to a male incarnation in the shape of Warhol superstar Mario Montez, famous for his promiscuous banana-eating scene in 1964. Like Miranda, Maria Montez camped onscreen: wearing costumes bedecked with flowers and golden platform wedges, making excessive use of fans and being especially known for her cobra headdresses. Smith defended Montez’ stylised form-above-content acting: ‘Wretch actress – why insist on her being an actress – why limit her? […] Her eye saw not just beauty but incredible, delirious, drug-like hallucinatory beauty. … magic for me, beauty for many, a camp to homos, Fauve American unconsciousness to Europeans etc. … Acting to Maria Montez was hoodwinking.’⁵ She was an exalted work of performance art, doing simply ‘what acting substitutes for,’ according to Smith.⁶ Similarly, Cuban singer La Lupe, whom Sontag mentions as a ‘random example of the canon of camp,’ was known for her stylised, frenzied performances in the 1960s and 70s, often superficially interpreted as exotic eccentricity.

Carmen Miranda’s identification with marginalised northern Brazilian women from Salvador in Bahia, whom she saw as fruit vendors in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, got criticised at home as perpetuating a bad stereotype, and her subsequent overseas success (she was the highest paid woman in Hollywood in 1945), resulted in her being booed upon her return to her adopted homeland. The song ‘They Say I Came Back Americanized’ is a harrowing and illuminative expression of Miranda’s position of being trapped between two cultures which both claimed her, yet did not allow her to determine her own artistic path. In America, although she learned to speak English well, she was not allowed to speak with a less ‘tropical’ accent, lest she get in trouble with studio bosses. She was obliged to keep making use of sexual innuendos and exotic onomatopoeia (‘chq- chqchq- crrrr- ch ch ch’), which famously resulted in her being commodified into a logo for Chiquita Bananas. Her association with bananas blocked her from being taken seriously as an actress, which she sang about: ‘I’d love to play a scene with Clark Gable/ With candle lights and wine upon the table/ But my producer tells me I’m not able/ ‘Cause I make my money with bananas.’ Like those of Montez, Miranda’s roles are restricted to two-dimensional characters, a phenomenon described by Sontag with regards to a, superficially at least, very different actress – Greta Garbo. ‘Garbo’s incompetence (at the least, lack of depth) as an actress enhances her beauty. She’s always herself.’ These actresses’ stylised, even sterile, aesthetic performance, is, according to Mark Booth, ‘a social, performative and political response to a period of sexual regulation that coincided with the heyday of the Hollywood musical.’⁷

Miranda’s ‘Brazilian Bombshell’ image was limited to that of the exotic, phallic woman. Her female masculinity and transgressive sexuality was expressed by the height of her hats, extremely amplified in Busby Berkeley’s direction of her perfomance ‘The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat’ in The Gang’s All Here. As a phallic woman Miranda’s inflated role play shows up the artificiality of gender, not unlike Mae West, who memorably impersonated a female impersonator.⁸ It could be said of both West and Miranda that they use camp as a strategy to undercut categories of race and gender, and Miranda’s camp in particular aims to overcome marginalised cultural identities. Both Miranda and Montez, through their sartorial excess, identified with minorities, with people of colour, women, gypsies, Jews, blacks, or even more generally, second-class citizens: ‘Those who, in their soul – in the centre of their earliest memories – felt different, their memories unbroken pain: not of a majority, not of they who say what shall be.’⁹

Although film scholar Pamela Robertson writes that camp, racially constructed as white, can be seen as a kind of blackface,¹⁰ I would argue that Miranda’s transracial camp, even though she is a white woman born in Portugal, is a precursor to ‘black camp,’ a form of double carnivalesque – a parody of a parody which upends stereotypes through a double negative. Social theorist Jonathan Dollimore has written that, ‘camp thereby negotiates some of the lived contradictions of the subordination, simultaneously refashioning as a weapon of attack an oppressive identity inherited as subordination and hollowing out dominant formations responsible for that identity in the first instance.’¹¹

A noteworthy example of black camp in costume is Josephine Baker’s sequined banana skirt, which contrasted the nudity of her fetishised, black ‘natural body’ with the artificial nature of the sequined bananas in a collision of comic incongruity. The bananas are used as phallic tools for queering preconceived notions about femininity and race.¹² Together with Miranda’s sequined bananas, these phony fruits are camp vehicles unveiling the artificiality of race and gender, and they express the intersectional quality of both Josephine Baker and Carmen Miranda’s theatrical costumes and performances. In Miranda’s case, her headdress of ‘forty-four and one half pounds,’ combined with platform shoes, made natural movement almost impossible, resulting in exaggerated hand gestures, another trademark of camp.

In 1986 African-American designer Patrick Kelly made a version of Baker’s banana skirt that combined the skirt with a metal wire top in a similar type of camping which ‘comments on the black body as consumable.’¹³ The banana skirt, like his use of the golliwog minstrel figure and the symbol of the watermelon, are examples of queer black camp instrumentalised by a black designer. By appropriating token symbols or memorabilia of blackness, they use the comic incongruity to overcome that otherness, flaunting the rules of political correctness. It transgresses the original Othering, not by negating it but by exaggerating and owning it.

Many are the scholars who have refuted Sontag’s claim that camp is apolitical, (Andrew Ross, Fabio Cleto, Richard Dyer, Jack Babuscio are but a few) and camp can indeed be used both as a ‘closeting’ tool of minorities in straight society and as a transgressive tool – its use is usually not neutral. Today, Carmen Miranda lives on both as a contested symbol of mass-market ‘Latinidade,’ as well as a queer signifier embodying the notion of the constructedness of gender, nationality and race. In the ‘Camp: Notes on Fashion’ exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, one can see eye-to-camp-eye with an example of a sequined fruit turban which Miranda wore for performances in Cuba in 1955. In the exhibition, too, is the Josephine Baker ensemble by Patrick Kelly, on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and accompanied by Philip Core’s 1984 piece ‘Camp is Josephine Baker.’ Illustrating Sequoia Barnes’ statement that ‘camp is inherent in black style,’ Josephine Baker’s performances and costumes continue to cast a long shadow touching upon the work of not just Patrick Kelly, but also contemporary artistes like Dapper Dan, Grace Jones, RuPaul and Billy Porter. One can but hope that black camp has – irreversibly – passed through oppression to inflate and embellish identity and queer cultural difference.

Karen Van Godtsenhoven is an Associate Curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, and works on the museums exhibition programming and collection development. She has contributed to the museum’s 2019 exhibition Camp: Notes on Fashion.

1. Interview with author. ↩

2. Kathryn Bishop-Sanchez, Creating Carmen Miranda, Race, Camp and Transnational Stardom, Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville, 2016. ↩

3. According to the Fabio Cleto: It has in fact been possible to trace a convergence between the camp scene and the Bakthinian carnivalesque, for the two share hierarchy inversion, mocking paradoxicality, sexual punning and innuendos, and a complex and multilayered power relationship between dominant and the subordinate (or deviant) […]. See Fabio Cleto (ed.) Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject—A Reader. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1999. ↩

4. Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp,’ Partisan Review 31, no. 4, 1964, pp. 515–30. ↩

5. Jack Smith, ‘The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez’ in Wait For Me at the Bottom of the Pool, 2013. ↩

6. Ibid. ↩

7. Mark Booth, Camp, Quartet, London, 1983, p. 169. ↩

8. According to Susan Sontag, ‘To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theatre.’ ↩

9. Ronald Tavel, ‘Maria Montez, Anima of an antediluvian world’ in Flaming Creatures: Jack Smith, His Amazing Life and Times, Serpent’s Tail, London, 1997, pp. 65-67. ↩

10. See Pamela Robertson, Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996. ↩

11. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. ↩

12. ‘To camp in public, especially in front of an audience of whites, is unacceptable on two levels. This is not only because the black body has fixed itself to mimic a transgression, but also because that black body is explicitly and unapologetically queer.’ Sequoia Barnes, ‘If you don’t bring no grits, don’t come:’ Critiquing a Critique of Patrick Kelly, Golliwogs and Camp as a Technique of Black Queer Expression, Open Cultural Studies 2017; 1: pp. 678–689. ↩

13. Ibid. ↩