Getting to the Meat of It: Fifteen Years of Lady Gaga’s Meat Dress
- Grace Guernsey
- Dec 3
- 4 min read
It’s not often that PETA and conservatives find themselves on the same side of a political controversy. In fact, precisely 15 years have passed since the last time this occurred. And what was the world-bending impetus? None other than Lady Gaga, of course, appearing at the MTV Video Music Awards on Sept. 12, 2010, adorned in meat, making both a fashion statement and a statement against the U.S. military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.
Now, let me be careful not to butcher the details here. The dress—one of the most shocking and talked-about looks in pop culture history—was designed by Franc Fernandez and styled by Nicola Formichetti. Made entirely from raw flank steak, the piece, like all good meat dishes, was made with love—or, at least, premium, locally-sourced ingredients. Fernandez purchased more than 40 pounds of raw beef from his brother’s butcher shop in Los Angeles to make the dress. Forget organic cotton—it’s organic beef’s time to shine!
The dress required not only hefty quantities of meat but also a hefty transportation and storage regimen. In order to keep the dress from rotting, Fernandez and Formichetti refrigerated the dress between appearances and sewed it onto Gaga’s corset backstage just before the start of the awards show. The flank steak hung loosely from the top of Gaga’s corset, drooping elegantly to create a cowl neck. It featured an asymmetrical skirt with giant slits putting Gaga’s legs on full display, juxtaposing her very-much-alive flesh with the very-much-dead meat. Gaga, of course, was artfully accessorized with a matching headpiece, purse, and shoes to complete the look. Gaga captured the eyes—and very likely the noses—of everyone walking the red carpet.
Gaga, though, was not the first to beef up the fashion industry in this way, citing her makeup artist, Val Garland, as her inspiration. Garland regularly wore meat out to party in Australia in the ’70s, embodying the world of punk rock at its height. She, perhaps, committed even further to the bit(e) than Gaga, adorning her hair with sausage links and her legs with Viking bacon leggings until she was dripping blood. After all, who needs Spirit Halloween’s liters of fake blood when you can have the real deal, oozing from the source?
Garland sought to make a statement with her attire to align herself with the punk rebellion. Gaga, likewise, sought to make a statement, but one of a different—and purely political—nature. Lady Gaga’s meat dress was a controversy in and of itself, but, more than that, it was a protest. The infamous dress represented Gaga’s detestation of the U.S. military’s long-standing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. From 1993 until 2011—very shortly after Gaga’s appearance in the raw flank steak dress—the policy established two clear prohibitions, evident in its name. Military leaders could not inquire about a service member’s sexual orientation, nor could service members disclose their sexual orientation. Gay military personnel, then, could lay down their lives for their country—protecting lofty (and hypocritical) American ideals of “freedom” and “liberty”—while being deprived of the freedom and liberty to openly love who they loved.
Gaga, who identifies as bisexual, decided the MTV Awards Show was the perfect place to proclaim that enough was enough. Gaga’s dress then not only reinvented the fashion of Garland but also reconfigured decades of the queer rights movement into one meaty display. Gaga’s dress helped make conversation around queer rights more palatable (and plateable) for public discourse, as she served the issue up on a silver platter both to the awards show audience and to viewers at home. Perhaps 15 years later, you’re tired of hearing about Gaga’s meat dress, but Gaga, too, was tired—tired of the government treating queer service members and the queer community at large like “pieces of meat.”
In a 2010 interview on The Ellen DeGeneres Show (oh, how the times have changed!), Gaga defended the meat dress, amidst backlash from organizations like PETA who criticized the dress as an animal rights abuse. Gaga, a vegan herself, acknowledged and then promptly dismissed these claims, asserting the means of wasting meat was justified for the dress’s political ends. Gaga declared, “If we don’t stand up for what we believe in, if we don’t fight for our rights, pretty soon we’re going to have as much rights as the meat on our bones. And I am not a piece of meat.”
The “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy was overturned three months after Gaga’s appearance in the meat dress (and decades after the rise of the queer rights movement), and President Obama signed the repeal act into law a year after the MTV Awards Show. Four years later, the Obergefell v. Hodges decision would legalize gay marriage. However, as challengers of the Obergefell decision make appeals to the Supreme Court this month in a sad attempt to have the case reheard, and the current administration deploys attack after attack on trans and gay communities, Gaga’s dress serves as a reminder: we must protest against any citizen being treated “like a piece of meat.” Thanks to taxidermist Sergio Vigilato, Gaga’s dress remains preserved and on display 15 years after its debut. If we can preserve a dress made out of meat, we must likewise preserve our rights not to be treated like meat.
Grace Guernsey is a junior in the SFS studying Culture & Politics with a minor in Spanish. She much prefers Lady Gaga’s soul-crushing ballads, like “A Million Reasons,” to her pop hits.