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

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

The party marks the opening of the Costume Institute’s themed annual fashion exhibition and has develop the style event of the year. Hosted by the US Vogue editor, Anna Wintour, A-list attendees are invited to interpret the demo’s theme at will, which this year is based on the 1964 essay, Notes on Camp by Susan Sontag, a 58-point treatise that reported 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 Holy day,” says Jane Tynan, a lecturer in fashion at Central St Martins, so where better to ratify an idea rooted in contrivance, frivolity, irony and performance than on a red carpet. But while camp appears with regularity in popular culture – foreman John Waters is expected to appear alongside camp icon Lady Gaga, one of this year’s co-hosts – punctiliously how guests (or rather their stylists) will translate the concept into a dress or suit has become a hot topic.

“To circumscribe 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 showy 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 hither 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 seep 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 diminished 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.”

Soothe, 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, faking you make the cut that is – Anna Wintour, the gala’s chair since 1995, draws the seating plan in December and is flagrant for exercising the power of veto. Asked if there was anything Donald Trump could do to land an invite this year, she answered: “Absolutely nothing.” Lady Gaga, Harry Styles and Serena Williams are confirmed as co-hosts, while the party and showing are sponsored by Gucci with all the money from ticket sales going to the Costume Institute.

Andrew Bolton, the Wendy Yu curator in charge for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute who helps on 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 living soul to make up their minds,” he says. “It has never lost its ability to be subversive even if it’s mainstream.”

Sontag’s essay just touches on actual fashion – “camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers” she composes – 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 pandect”. The worry is that in attempting to turn an abstract idea into an outfit, the wearer risks pushing camp, in a refuge for marginalised people, even further into the mainstream.

“Does that make it controversial? Possibly,” he breaks. “ But just as with the punk exhibition [in 2013], where some people felt we had betrayed it and that hooligan 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 core since 2017 but settled on it now because he felt “camp tended to resurface during political and social turmoil, when group 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 fors himself well to it, as does Theresa May, and as did Thatcher”. It’s also, he says, a bit of “light relief”.

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

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

How “pitch 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 foretold to make an appearance.

Part of camp’s relevance in 2019 is Sontag’s approach to challenging nominative conventions of gender and the amplifying 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 opted 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 brooks that some of the criticism could simply be a case of fashion once again “being treated with mistrust” by high art. “It’s rarely seen as a totally serious form,” she says. But Sontag’s premise that camp occupies a attitude between high and low culture means that if guests get the theme right, then this year’s event could as opposed to 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 gigantic challenge for the Met Gala to set itself, a great gauntlet to throw down,” says Russell. “I just wonder if they’ll diminish it off or whether it will be an orgy of self-congratulation by designers.”