Fascism is so Last Season! Camp and Sartorial Satire as a Mechanism of Governmental Control and Political Protest
By Reilly Lowell
Adapted from her undergraduate thesis, December 2024

In a recapitulated version of her senior honors thesis, Reilly Lowell explores the use of camp and Sartorial Satire as a reflexively political strategy—both as populace-control by a government, and as contemporaneous and/or retroactive protest by a people. This specific application is to the Italian fascist regime before and during WWII, as well as the post-factum adoption of the same campy maneuver by the democracy that followed. This piece serves as a negation of Susan Sontag’s claim that camp is apolitical, instead unfolding how it fundamentally is.

Reilly graduated from Georgetown University with a BSFS in Culture and Politics, and a concentration in historiography & narrative construction/collapse. She is a current student at the Parsons MAFS and the editor of the Punk Protest / Camp Costuming exhibit.

Her writing is attached as a PDF here, with the full bibliography. The full version of her thesis can be found here.

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punk protest / camp costuming : the digital library

exhibit showing at la sudestada in greenpoint — may 1-10, 2026

punk protest / camp costuming :
the digital library