Let the summer camp begin!

"The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious," Susan Sontag wrote in her famous essay "On Camp." "The Art Nouveau craftsman who makes a lamp with a snake coiled around it is not kidding, nor is he trying to be charming. He is saying, in all earnestness: Voila! the Orient!"

And so, in all earnestness: Voila! the Olympic spirit, as reflected by the ceremonial outfits of the Canadian and Australian athletes. And Voila! the Orient, too, as the Canadian designers incorporated Chinese motifs in their clothes to honor the setting of the '08 Games.

June Thomas, Slate's foreign editor, and Josh Levin, its sports editor, have a amusing exchange about the Canadian sartorial decisions here. (Viewer be warned: Metaphors involving vomited paint are deployed.) Thomas and Levin spare a few words, too, for the Australians and their (inadvertant?) homage to the Golden Age of Jet Travel:

Meanwhile, the United States, no stranger to uniform miscues in the past, has opted for an nostalgic, "Evelyn Waugh's England" aesthetic, especially for the men. It will come as no surprise, once you've seen a photo, that Ralph Lauren was the designer.

Now it's on to the opening ceremonies, that great quadrennial festival of cheese that also calls to mind Sontag's essay. "Camp taste," she wrote, "turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art (and life) a different -- a supplementary -- set of standards." Don't condemn the aesthetic travesties from your couch: Supplement your standards!