The burning question at the 2019 Met Gala, the starry red carpet event that takes place at the Costume Institute in New York on Monday evening, is not about who is going, or which designer they are wearing.

Thanks to this year’s theme – “Camp: Notes on Fashion” – it’s about how an intellectual concept famously hard to define will work in a celebrity-driven fashion context.

The party marks the opening of the Costume Institute’s themed annual fashion exhibition and has become the style event of the year. Hosted by the US Vogue editor, Anna Wintour, A-list attendees are invited to interpret the exhibition’s theme at will, which this year is based on the 1964 essay, Notes on Camp by Susan Sontag, a 58-point treatise that brought the word and idea into the mainstream.

As themes go, it might seem like a logical choice. “Fashion is inherently camp and so is the Met Gala,” says Jane Tynan, a lecturer in fashion at Central St Martins, so where better to ratify an idea rooted in artifice, frivolity, irony and performance than on a red carpet. But while camp appears with regularity in popular culture – director John Waters is expected to appear alongside camp icon Lady Gaga, one of this year’s co-hosts – precisely how guests (or rather their stylists) will translate the concept into a dress or suit has become a hot topic.

“To define camp is to kill it. Camp can’t be canonised – if it is, then it dies,” says Dr David Russell, author and associate professor in English at Corpus Christi, Oxford. “Equally camp is not aimed at the mainstream, so [here] it is at risk of thunderously missing the point.” If last year’s Heavenly Bodies theme centred around liturgical vestments inspired by Catholicism, and was seen as brilliant PR by the church but also a source of controversy, then this year’s may well do the latter but for different reasons.

Tynan agrees: “The camp theme fits in a strange and intriguing way with the Met Gala in 2019 in that it reflects the failed seriousness of current structures – but one of the criticisms is that there is not sufficient space at a red carpet gala to explore this sufficiently.”

Still, the pomp surrounding the Met Gala is suitably high given the theme. Tickets can sell for $30,000 each and a table for $275,000, assuming you make the cut that is – Anna Wintour, the gala’s chair since 1995, draws the seating plan in December and is notorious for exercising the power of veto. Asked if there was anything Donald Trump could do to land an invite this year, she said: “Absolutely nothing.” Lady Gaga, Harry Styles and Serena Williams are confirmed as co-hosts, while the party and exhibition are sponsored by Gucci with all the money from ticket sales going to the Costume Institute.

Anna Wintour, the host of the Met Gala 2019, at a press conference for the Costume Institute’s spring 2019 exhibition. Photograph: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images for the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Andrew Bolton, the Wendy Yu curator in charge for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute who helps choose the theme, thinks it is less about defining the word and more about opening up a dialogue. “We want to try to explain it, and then invite people to make up their minds,” he says. “It has never lost its ability to be subversive even if it’s mainstream.”

Sontag’s essay barely touches on actual fashion – “camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers” she writes – but she does outline “the essence of Camp as its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration” and the word itself as “esoteric … a private code”. The worry is that in attempting to turn an abstract idea into an outfit, the wearer risks pushing camp, originally a refuge for marginalised people, even further into the mainstream.

“Does that make it controversial? Possibly,” he says. “ But just as with the punk exhibition [in 2013], where some people felt we had betrayed it and that punk didn’t belong in a museum, the point was precisely the co-option of punk by fashion. It’s quite theoretical.”

Bolton has toyed with the theme since 2017 but settled on it now because he felt “camp tended to resurface during political and social turmoil, when society is polarised – so of course we’re in a camp moment,” he says. If camp is about failed seriousness and artifice, as Sontag claims, then “Trump lends himself well to it, as does Theresa May, and as did Thatcher”. It’s also, he says, a bit of “light relief”.

Camp icon Lady Gaga, a Met Gala 2019 co-host, is expected to appear alongside John Waters. Photograph: Christopher Polk/Rex/Shutterstock

For the first time in its history the exhibition will be divided into two parts: the first room will trace the etymological origin of camp, the second will look at the different modes of representation and how they play out in fashion. “One is a whispering gallery, the second like an echo chamber.”

Appearing in the exhibition – and likely on the red carpet itself in homage – are Paul Poiret’s comically shaped “lampshade” dress, Virgil Abloh’s irony-laden “little black dress” dress and a Franco Moschino chemise emblazoned with a question mark which closes the exhibition, “the idea being that camp is a question mark”, says Bolton.

How “camp fashion” will appear on the red carpet is typically shrouded in secrecy, but alongside these designers, pieces by Mary Quant, Schiaparelli and Jean Paul Gaultier are predicted to make an appearance.

Part of camp’s relevance in 2019 is Sontag’s approach to challenging nominative conventions of gender and the heightening of gender codes. “The androgyne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility,” wrote Sontag. For the first time it seems the Met has chosen a theme aimed as much at men as women. “I expect we’ll see women in suits, men in dresses, and everything in between,” says Bolton.

Tynan feels that some of the criticism could simply be a case of fashion once again “being treated with suspicion” by high art. “It’s rarely seen as a totally serious form,” she says. But Sontag’s premise that camp occupies a position between high and low culture means that if guests get the theme right, then this year’s event could instead be a moment of brilliant PR for the fashion industry.

In many ways, courting controversy is the point, particularly if you want to draw headlines. “It’s a great challenge for the Met Gala to set itself, a great gauntlet to throw down,” says Russell. “I just wonder if they’ll pull it off or whether it will be an orgy of self-congratulation by designers.”