Live, Laugh, Love
The 2019 Met Costume Institute show’s theme was CAMP, based on the essay by Susan Sontag, which touches on film, music, furniture, decor, literature, fashion, restaurants, but not the field of design I call a career. That got me thinking: is there a graphic design or branding equivalent we can qualify as Camp?
Camp is many things: artifice, theatricalization, irony, playfulness, bad taste as a vehicle for good art, exaggeration rather than content. Camp is passionate, serious, naive and very much unintentional. I’m not above myself to think my work hasn’t fallen into this category at least once.
There’s a lot of bad design out there, but being bad doesn’t necessarily make it Camp. Unless, of course, we’re talking about this masterpiece of New York City subway advertising:
While Dr. Zizmor’s graphic designer is the mic drop of my Camp quest, it’s almost too perfect and too specific. It’s the silly extravagance of every tool Adobe has to offer, Sontag’s “woman walking around wearing a dress made of three million feathers.” But it is just one isolated example that doesn’t extend beyond subway banners.
On a broader scale in branding and design, I can’t think of anything more Camp than the universal embrace of all things “Live, Laugh, Love.” What started in a 1904 poem by Bessie Anderson Staley has become a category of business for Home Goods.
The phrase inspires design, illustration, and personal branding. It revived the market for curly handwritten fonts. It is widely mocked, yet also taken very, very seriously. As a designer, I’m embarrassed to admit it was the basis of a holiday campaign for a home decor site I worked on in 2010, reworded as “Live, Love, Home.”
My second example of Camp in modern branding is the world of Pumpkin Spice. To be clear: I’m not simply listing examples of “basic” things that are easy meme-generators. I think the PSL fits the Camp profile, and the original Starbucks creation is an example of marketing genius for celebrating the Campiness of it. Camp is about the artificial and exaggeration - where this beverage goes in flavor, the way its seasonal launch signals the start of fall, and the media coverage it receives.
Starbucks seems to play into the irony of Pumpkin Spice hysteria, and I’m happy that they own it and glorify its character. It’s when pumpkin spice starts to migrate into every other brand that the idea takes on a level of vulgarity, an exaggeration without content. A different, more naive kind of Camp, the “pure Camp.”
The first PSL hit the market in January 2003, over a year before Susan Sontag passed away. If she had been alive to see its marketing growth, I like to think she may have added an addendum to her essay in honor of it.
This blog post is incomplete. There have got to be other great examples in branding and graphic design today. Respond below and I will add them above.
