long live high camp travis kelce
travis kelce's cover shoot for 'gq' is high camp & you can't convince me otherwise
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Last week, timed perfectly to coincide with his girlfriend’s appearance on his podcast to announce her 12th studio album, GQ dropped a profile of everyone’s favorite NFL himbo, Travis Kelce. The content of the cover story was nothing too special or revealing, but the photos of Kelce that ran alongside the story generated all kinds of opinion and discourse and I want to talk about them.
The shoot was styled by Law Roach, who is perhaps best known for being Zendaya’s stylist but has made a television career for himself in recent years as a judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race and now the rebooted version of Project Runway. In an interview about his vision and process for the photos, Roach says he set out to tell “the story of this really true Floridian dude’s dude, but with this undertone of fashion.”
And sorry, but I am obsessed with the results. I think this is absolutely brilliant. There was a good deal of disagreement in the OOYL Discord server about this, but you can’t convince me that this photoshoot isn’t camp.
I mean, Travis Kelce—the boyfriend of the biggest pop star in the world, arguably the biggest name in the NFL, every Swiftie’s dream boyfriend—is holding a Hermès bag in the middle of the Everglades, with a giant fur hat on his head.
Bless you, Law Roach.
As a native Floridian, I do believe I am qualified to say how absolutely ridiculous and laughable this idea of a “Florida man” is, mostly because of the amount of fur this man is wearing in the swamp. It’s gotta be in the high 90s with like 90% humidity and they have this man dressed like he’s going to trek through an arctic tundra even though he’s standing on an airboat like some deranged Crocodile Dundee.
Over at her newsletter,
speculated that this photoshoot, particularly the photo of Kelce in a neon construction vest sans shirt, was “some masculine re-balancing” for the fact that the version of himself he presented on his podcast with Swift was of a man simping for his very smart, very talented, very accomplished girlfriend. But I’m not so sure about that; in fact, I’d argue that if you take the photoshoot as a whole and pair it with the very sweet and smitten image of Tayvis that the pair promoted on the pod, I’m much more inclined to think this is Kelce’s team (perhaps working in tandem with Swift’s) promoting him as a non-toxic version of masculinity (especially to counteract the visual of him screaming at his coach during last year’s Super Bowl, which wrote about brilliantly).
If that really was the goal, Roach is the perfect person to style it. He’s not exactly known for having a normative take on the idea of masculinity, and as a gay man creating the visual narrative for this shoot, I find it hard to believe that Roach didn’t lean into making this as campy as humanly possible. You mean to tell me that Travis Kelce wearing a fur suit over his, well, natural fur suit isn’t a wink and a nod to bear culture? You think Roach isn’t aware of the rumors that Tayvis are bearding for each other and decided to lean all the way in?
Well, maybe not but I’m choosing to believe it is because that’s a very fun thought.
Talking about the construction vest shot, Roach says it was supposed to feel like, “Oh, he just got off a construction job. He’s been working all day. He’s just going to go jump into the ocean to cool off.” Come on! No one does this! This isn’t real! And he doesn’t even look sexy in this photo, he looks like he is mocking a mainstream, heteronormative version of sexy and that is what is so appealing about the shot. It almost reads as as a reference to one those “hot firefighter” calendars.
Law Roach does not fit into a normative masculine presentation and so when he says he wants to project his idea of what this “dude’s dude” version of masculinity looks like, there’s almost no way for it to be anything but exaggerated and ridiculous. This version of masculinity borders on drag; you could show me a drag king in all of these looks and I would immediately understand the kind of man that was being channeled. It takes someone on the outside of those norms to see the absurdity in them.
Again, we have Kelce wearing a fringed leather jacket and cowboy boots while standing among mangrove trees in a humid AF swamp. He’s still not wearing a shirt. It’s laughable. It’s cartoonish. It’s a complete sendup of the idea of a “man’s man”—wearing wildly impractical outfits while doing outlandishly macho and lowkey dangerous things.
And isn’t that exactly what “camp” is? It’s an aesthetic that is exaggerated and theatrical, with a touch of irony and self-awareness. It’s always been queer, dating back to the 17th century, a way to mock mainstream cultural norms, particularly as they relate to gender. It’s tongue-in-cheek.
It’s Travis Kelce sitting on an ATV under a forest of palm fronds while wearing hiking boots and a fur-collared jacket.
In Susan Sontag’s famous 1964 essay, “Notes on Camp,” she cites 58 defining features of the term, but in looking at these photos of Kelce, I keep coming back to number 41: “The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious.’ One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.”
On the shoot, Kelce “was so fun,” Roach says. “He was like, I don’t care. I’ll do that.” I love that for him, and for us.
Long live high camp Travis Kelce.
Brilliant, glorious and ever so faaabulous.
Wait. There are people who don't think this is camp?! What even?
Thanks for your delightful gilding of the extremely camp lily. Loved it.