Lady Gaga’s iconic meat dress hits 15th anniversary as designer shares details

Fifteen years ago, as she prepared for the 2010 VMAs red carpet on September 12, Lady Gaga had a backup plan for her now-famous meat dress. If the custom look didn’t fit properly, if the meat spoiled, or if it dripped too much blood, she had another outfit waiting. But designer Franc Fernandez, who crafted the dress that is now displayed at Park MGM in Las Vegas, had already spent three long days carefully draping butcher cuts over a mannequin torso. “Obviously, I didn’t want that backup plan to happen,” he told Billboard.

The meat dress was one of three outfits Gaga wore during the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards. While it wasn’t the launch of her career — “Poker Face” had already topped the Billboard Hot 100 the year before, and she took home eight awards that night for her hits “Bad Romance” and “Telephone” — the dress made a powerful statement. Gaga explained at the time that it was a protest against the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. The bold choice not only cemented her status as a cultural icon but also put Fernandez on the map as a designer. Since then, he has gone on to work with stars like Rihanna and Beyoncé and is now represented by William Morris.

At that point, however, Fernandez was still struggling to build a name for himself and make a living in the creative world, even though he was already part of Haus of Gaga. After Gaga wore the dress, everything changed for him. “Like most people who are in a creative field and have immigrant parents, there’s this constant ‘you should get a real job’ sentiment, which you internalize and think, ‘Yeah, they’re probably right, because this hasn’t been fruitful,’” he said. “But the scale of the publicity that got just gave me: ‘OK, you’re running towards something, and you’ve got some of it, so keep going.’”

To mark the anniversary of the meat dress on September 12, Billboard caught up with Fernandez in Los Angeles to reflect on the look and its lasting impact.

How did the meat dress project come to you? Was there a brief, or a white paper?

It started with Nicola [Formichetti, then Gaga’s stylist] saying, “We want to make a meat purse for the red carpet.” Somewhere along the way, we were like, “Let’s do a full dress.” I don’t even think it was a fully formed idea until I started making the dress and she saw it, halfway done. She was like, “Holy sh-t!” in this way of “I didn’t know this thing was fully being formed.” It was more like a small shock — which I think is normal when you see that much meat slung on a hanger.

I’ve read you bought the meat from your family butcher.

There’s an Argentine market and butcher shop in the Valley that is now called Mercado Buenos Aires. I just went up to him. Well, it was also my family. I called my family and I was like, “Hey, I have to make this thing out of meat,” and they’re like, “Oh, you should use this cut,” and the butcher would go, “Yeah, you should definitely use this cut.” They all knew I was doing some strange work at the time, so I don’t think there was a lot of pushback.

How much meat did you wind up using?

About 60 pounds. It was a good amount on her body. I mean, she’s small, so I’m sure that was a lot.

Are you a meat eater? Was anything about this counter to your values?

I’m Argentinian. If anything, these are my values. All we do is eat red meat. It was definitely not a problem.

How challenging was the meat to work with?

I let the meat dictate what I could do. We sewed it onto a corset with carpet threads, so it was really thick, strong thread, and followed the striations of the meat to make sure whatever we had attached wouldn’t have fallen off. I didn’t fight the meat.

How much time did you have?

Probably three days, one day spent sourcing the meat. I didn’t have the space to do it. I was staying at a friend’s basement in Silver Lake. Another friend, [Australian singer-songwriter] Sam Sparro, had the space. He was like, “If you want to make this here, you can turn up the A/C and work.” So I worked out of his living room. He was really nice to let me do that and cleared out his fridge and had half of a mannequin in it.

The mannequin on which you draped the meat?

It was more like a bust form, an actual dress form.

So you were opening the fridge and putting meat on the mannequin torso?

No, we weren’t building in the fridge. We were building it outside. Obviously, when you took breaks, or if the meat had been out, you didn’t want it out too long. One hour in, one hour out, etc. It was pretty gruesome.

How worried were you that the meat would spoil?

Oddly, I wasn’t worried about the spoiling. I was more worried about the color losing its vibrance, because meat is so bright and red and beautiful when it’s refrigerated and fresh. The butcher told me to spray it with some salt water here and there to keep its redness, and it worked. Also, the kind of meat is called matambre [a thin cut of beef], and it’s more (of) a greasier cut than a bloody cut. We were less worried about it dripping.

When did you realize, “We’re done, this is perfect”?

When I saw her on camera, on the monitors, we were backstage at the VMAs — once she was sewn into it and the shoes were on. I was fussing with it a bit in the elevator on the way for her to get into her seat.

What other logistical problems did you worry about as you built up to the end?

I just remember it happening so fast. More than anything, it was like, “I hope she likes it, I hope she wears it.”

I’ve read there was a taxidermy process to maintain the meat.

After she wore the dress, I went to pick it up the next day and put it in a trash bag and carried it out. It was frozen at my parents’ freezer for a couple months, along with the shoes and everything, until we decided what to do with it. And this idea came up about taxidermying it. I took it back to my friend’s house and at that point it had rotted a bit. It was kind of gross, but we put masks on and we sewed it back in place.

How important was this thing you created to Lady Gaga’s career, and culture?

I have Google alerts on my name. There will always be an article about the 20 most shocking dresses of all time — Björk in her swan dress or J.Lo in the Versace dress — fashion moments that are shocking that ultimately are not that shocking. They’re just a moment in time.

Gaga has addressed this, but did you get outrage from anti-meat activists?

Yeah. I’m for everyone having whatever diet they want, but there are extreme animal activists that are aggressive. I definitely got some interesting emails at the time, some I had to hand to detectives to make sure it was documented. Because I noticed the outrage, I made two Facebook groups, a pro-meat-dress group and an anti-meat-dress group, and they didn’t know that I was running both. There was another Facebook group, this time much later, about how I made the meat dress out of dead babies or something — it was the strangest, most outlandish thing. At the time, I saw the letter Q [for QAnon] on things, and I didn’t really know what that was.

The refrigerator at your friend’s house where you stored the work-in-progress meat dress — that seems historic. Is that fridge still at that house?

[Laughs.] Well, he moved out. It was a loft in downtown L.A. Landlords probably still have that fridge. I should’ve asked. That would be a fun piece to have. I guess.