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Fifteen years ago, as she prepared to hit the 2010 VMAs red carpet on Sept. 12, 2010, Lady Gaga had a backup plan for her meat dress. If the tailor-made look didn’t fit, if the meat spoiled or it dripped too much blood, the rising superstar had something else ready on the rack. But Franc Fernandez, the designer of the dress that is today on display at the Park MGM in Las Vegas, had worked three long days to create it, draping butcher cuts on a mannequin torso. “Obviously, I didn’t want that backup plan to happen,” he tells Billboard.
The meat dress, one of three Gaga wore during MTV’s 2010 Video Music Awards, did not launch her career: “Poker Face” had topped the Billboard Hot 100 the previous year, and she won eight awards that night for top 5 hits “Bad Romance” and “Telephone.” But the fashion statement, which Gaga said was a protest against the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy at the time, helped turn her into a cultural icon and established Fernandez’s career in the process. He has since worked with Rihanna, Beyoncé and others, and is represented by William Morris.
Back then, though he was part of the singer’s creative team known as Haus of Gaga, Fernandez was struggling to build a reputation and make enough money to support a creative career. After Gaga wore the dress, his life changed. “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 says. “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 meat dressiversary — Sept. 12 — Billboard reached out to Fernandez in Los Angeles.
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 my friend [Australian singer-songwriter] Sam Sparro’s basement in Silver Lake. 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.
