At Monday night’s Met Gala, the most famous people on the planet interpreted the night’s theme—camp, as in Susan Sontag, not summer—with varying degrees of success. Jared Leto carried his own head, which was extremely camp. Benedict Cumberbatch dressed like Tom Wolfe, which was a nice effort. For almost all of the attendees, the working definition of “camp” seemed to be, as my colleague Cam Wolf put it, “the most absolutely batshit fashion imaginable.”

Except, that is, for Frank Ocean and Kanye West, who both wore incredibly boring outfits—and, in the process, nailed the theme better than almost anyone else in attendance.

Ocean hit the pink carpet in quiet black and white: white shirt and black tie, black work pants cropped to show off big clunky black boots, and a black nylon Prada anorak over the top. Kanye, meanwhile, went even more minimal: a black Dickies jacket that costs less than $50, black Dickies pants, black Yeezy combat boots. Two outfits, two dour expressions, all of...two colors. It’s difficult to imagine two pink-carpet looks less in line with the night’s theme. Right?

Jamie McCarthy

Wrong! Consider this passage from "Notes on Camp," Susan Sontag’s oft-cited, occasionally-read essay on the concept:

Camp is the attempt to do something extraordinary. But extraordinary in the sense, often, of being special, glamorous…Not extraordinary merely in the sense of effort. Ripley's Believe-It-Or-Not items are rarely campy.

In this reading, what could be more camp than an outfit extraordinary only in its ordinariness? In a sea of outfits seemingly yanked from Ripley’s, what’s more striking than an outfit you can truly, definitely believe? If you wear all black workwear to the bar, you fit in. If you wear all black to the Met Gala, you’re making a statement even louder than the one Katy Perry thinks she’s making by wearing a chandelier.

Dia Dipasupil

We’ve come to expect this kind of fashion foresight from Frank and Ye. West, of course, is responsible for entire swaths of modern menswear, while Ocean turns big green bags and informercial vests into must-cop items.

Camp, as Sontag writes elsewhere in her essay, is “something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.” On Monday night, the outfits at the Met Gala all tried to out-shout each other, turning almost incomprehensible in the process. Ocean and West, meanwhile, made noise by saying as little as possible—a shared code if I’ve ever seen one.