Lady Gaga On The Meat Dress and 19 Other Iconic Looks

Hello Vogue, this is lady Gaga

and I'm here to go through all my life in looks.

Kind of nervous about this.

I believe this was 2008.

I was backstage at MTV

and I did TRL, Total Request Live

and this is a leotard in a hood made by Muto-Little.

And the glasses that I'm wearing

are actually archive Versace.

These were the same style of sunglasses

that were worn by Biggie.

I wore these everywhere.

It was inspired by Grace Jones,

obviously with the hood.

That hair on my head is a full wig

that I had sewn to my head and I never took off ever.

I wore probably one of three different outfits

for about five years straight

because that's what I could afford at the time

and I wanted people always to recognize me.

So this was my initial iconic look.

You can tell from the way that I'm standing there

that I already felt like a star before anything came out

and I would say to anybody that's young and watching

that, you know, if you believe in yourself,

you don't need other people to tell you you're great

to know that you're an artist on the inside already.

So this was for the MuchMusic Awards.

This was designed by Tom Talmon Studio.

But I wanna be very specific,

the jewelry that I'm wearing on this

is what we called the Fire Bra.

I wanted it to shoot fire from my breasts

but we decided it was safer to shoot sparks.

So essentially, what would happen

is I had a remote control in my hand

that once I pressed it,

it triggered this fire bra to go off.

And what would happen was a piece of steel

would rub against was essentially, like a flint,

and it would spin very fast

and the sparks would shoot off of me.

And I used to joke and say I need my jewelry,

and then they would bring me my fire bra.

And those are Pleaser boots that we had studded.

I've worn the same stripper heels my entire career.

They're tried and true and they're worth it.

Oh, I love this one.

This is Atsuko Kudo.

This is when I was in England

and I was meeting the Queen

and I wanted to dress like a queen in a British fashion

and I also wanted to do it in my way.

But we thought that we would give this look of a queen

a modern twist by making it in latex.

And at the time, Atsuko Kudo was the only designers

that I could think of that were actually

tailoring latex in this way.

It's very difficult to tailor latex.

Well, this was a wonderful evening.

This was my first ever Grammy Awards

and Armani wanted to dress me.

And I was actually very excited to be dressed by Armani

because I knew that everything would be tailored perfectly

and it would also be high fashion.

So this piece fit me absolutely perfect.

What's also very funny is that these shoes

were stolen backstage after the show.

I think we found them later on eBay somewhere

and we found out how to get them back.

I just wanted to give a very specific shout-out also

to Frederic Aspiras who designed this hair.

He was the one who, for the first time,

put this idea of creating this piss yellow hair color

as a way of celebrating pop art in motion.

So if you think about Lichtenstein, for example,

the way blondes were represented was with yellow hair

and this was a very special night.

I had just won a Grammy before this happened,

my first Grammy I won right before I wore this.

Okay well, here's me and Beyonce.

This was created by Haus of Gaga and Perry Meek.

Me and Beyonce, really in this video,

we wanted there to be a balance between fashion and camp.

So we wanted to do a play on the American flag

and a play on capitalism.

The inspiration for the Americana vibe

was that the song Telephone

was about being inundated with phone calls.

I was playing around when I wrote that song

with this idea that we were, as a society,

becoming more and more obsessed

with interacting with each other

in a way that was less real,

and that led me to this,

the ingesting of capitalism

in a way that's not healthy for us.

So it's a commentary on American culture.

So the meat dress, it's actually Val Garland's idea.

Val Garland, the makeup artist,

her and I worked together for a long time

and she shared a story with me

where she had gone to a party wearing sausages,

and I thought this was quite funny.

And I said, Well, that's a great way

to make sure that everybody leaves you alone at a party.

I was speaking with my artistic friends

about if we wanted to make any statements

while we were at the MTV Video Music Awards,

and we did wanna make a statement.

Because at the time,

they were trying to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell

but we decided to do the meat dress

because I thought to myself,

if you were willing to die for your country,

what does it matter how you identify?

This was ultimately designed by Franc Fernandez

but it was the brainchild of Haus of Gaga.

And we were backstage with Brandon Maxwell

who was working as one of my stylists at the time.

He was vegan also and still helping to sew

all of these last bits of meat to me

and making my meat hat and my meat purse

which was held by Cher.

It smelled like meat.

It was thrilling to wear.

There's a corset under this

but the corset was sewn to the meat.

So this is actually a garment.

They didn't just drape meat over me

and crossed their fingers.

This was the McQueen dress

from his last collection that I wore

and we recreated the feathers

but I am wearing the Armadillo heels from Plato's Atlantis,

which was the crescendo before we unfortunately lost him.

I've always been inspired by Alexander McQueen.

I think he's potentially the greatest designer of all time.

This dress in particular,

it does actually represent a lot of what I love about him,

which is that, you know, this is a Bosch print.

And if you know anything about Bosch art,

there's sort of these violence

and these tiny little odd things that are happening

that too many are grotesque and ugly and wrong.

And somehow, he found beauty in these things

and that was a piece of him and he celebrated women

and he celebrated all types of women.

Okay so this next piece,

we would call this an outfit.

Everybody calls it The Egg

but it's actually a vessel

that was designed by Hussein Chalayan.

The outfits that are worn

by the models and dancers that are around me,

that was created by Haus of Gaga.

I was very particular about the way the fashion looked

for this performance

in so much as the night before the performance.

I said, The fashion's wrong.

We don't have it.

We need it to be latex.

We need nude latex.

And if you know anything about looking for latex,

years ago, it was very difficult to find latex

in any other place other than a sex shop

or where we found this latex

was a bus company had latex that they were using

to cover the seats of their buses,

and we found the latex

and we asked if we could buy it from them.

So everybody's fashion that's made here

was made from the fabric of seats for a bus.

I was in the egg for three days.

To be honest, at award shows,

especially during this time,

I didn't like to talk to people.

I always felt that it threw me off of my performance.

So this, in a lot of ways,

is really representative

of my devotion to my craft

and that I really wanted to be with myself.

Okay so this is Jo Calderone.

This is an alter ego that I made

and I wanted to be subversive

and this was my way of creating

a different type of statement for myself.

At this time, I was actually going through a breakup,

so I actually created this character

that was my boyfriend.

I inhabited this character, Jo Calderone.

So it was representative of relationship,

representative of my father as well.

But everything about this was just meant

to be kind of a Jersey boy Greaser.

I'm always fully in character

when I've been Jo.

It's a feeling and I wanted him to be dirty

and I rehearsed a lot with the boys

and I have little lifts in my shoes

to keep me a little bit taller because I'm short.

Okay this is one of my favorite photoshoots

that Nick and I ever did.

Nick Knight and I, for this outfit,

we had this idea

of shooting me inside

of what was essentially meant

to be placenta fluid.

We created this artistic goo

and the goo artist was Bart Hess.

And I am wearing high heels in it, I can see.

They look like Givenchy, McQueen Givenchy.

And I have this huge hat on

that I believe is a Stephen Jones hat.

But this goo that you see on me,

it started out sort of in one way.

And then as I performed for Nick for several hours,

the goo started to take many different forms.

This is a garment but this is a moving garment.

Now this is the American Music Awards

and I wanted to do something fun

and exciting and whimsical and I thought,

why not come to the American Music Awards

as the actual ad for my Versace campaign with Donatella?

So I wanted to arrive as this, you know,

Italian goddess that she had turned me

into for the campaign.

If we'd like to include my accessories,

for example, my purse this evening was a mechanical horse.

We decided to wear the horse

as a way to get onto the red carpet

but we wanted it to be exciting,

so we painted her white,

but guess what the horse is made out of?

Chanel purses, so that horse is my purse.

Okay so this next look, I wore this in London.

I believe I was leaving The Langham Hotel

and it was during the promotion for my album, ARTPOP,

which was a heavily scrutinized album.

But I believed in putting art in the front

and the whole record

was about how art can mean anything to you.

So I often did my own takes on other artists

as well as iconography throughout history.

So of course, I visited Picasso.

I still have those ruffle socks to this day.

They're about 2.99.

And I'm wearing this jacket,

it's really actually a sweatshirt from Dog in Tokyo.

Dog is a really, really dope store

in the Harajuku area.

And then, Frederic Aspiras did my hair

and we were obsessed with this sort

of odd combination of black and blonde at the same time.

Tara Savelo was brilliant, my makeup artist.

We used a technique in Harajuku makeup

as a way to create anime eyes

by creating the pupil on the eyelid.

And often, I'll do this with fashion

depending on what it is.

I'll hold my face in a particular way

in order to get the expression

across that I find interesting.

So in order to look like a Picasso,

I sort of have this sort of fractured look on my face

and I have one eye closed to reveal the other eye.

I don't think there's much

that's more punk than this look.

It represents a very dark time in my life,

but often, the darkest times in my life,

you'll see the most joyful outfits.

This was created by Dayne Henderson and Vex Clothing.

So this is inflatable.

It was very lightweight.

If this was made in any other way,

it would be quite heavy,

but I was able to just run about the stage in this.

And this is absolute Club Kid culture clothing,

which was something that we really wanted to celebrate

at the ARTPOP ball because it was all about celebrating art,

celebrating music but also celebrating the way

that those things come together underground.

This piece in particular was created on an airplane.

We were flying to Greece and so much of ARTPOP

was inspired by Greek sculptures.

When I landed in Greece,

I wanted to land as the Venus.

So we created this on an airplane.

So I'm wearing stripper shoes.

I'm wearing two metal seashells that we just had.

And then, I've got a thong underneath,

and I believe that this is some sort of beach situation

that I had with me

because I was excited to get some sun in Greece.

This was a performance art piece,.

So when we got off the plane,

me and my entire group of dancers,

we walked out to my song Venus

and I was wearing this outfit.

Got dressed on the plane.

So this was created by Jack Irving.

This is all made of Mylar,

and I actually was wearing a ventilation system

that was pumping air into these spikes,

but I didn't let the spikes reveal themselves

until I was standing in front of the paparazzi.

So when I got out of the car,

it just looked like a Mylar cape.

And then in the middle of the street,

I pressed a button and I inflated the entire piece.

I was very interested in inflatable fashion at this point.

This was just simply to freak out the paparazzi.

This is a beautiful, beautiful dress

made by Brandon Maxwell.

I felt like a princess in it

and I felt like a little girl.

It was a very simple, beautifully made black dress

and I won my first Oscar in that dress.

I remember I also had to be in charge

of taking care of that Tiffany's diamond

that Audrey Hepburn wore

and no one had worn it since she wore it

for Breakfast at Tiffany's

so I was the first person to wear it,

and I remember I left the Oscars to go to a party

and I left security behind and everybody was mad at me.

Sorry, sorry, Tiffany's.

I love you and you got your diamond back.

This is also Brandon Maxwell.

Brandon dressed me for the Met Gala

when the theme was camp

by means of the definition by Susan Sontag.

I found this to be very fun.

This was an entire performance

that we prepared for the carpet.

I remember calling Anna and asking her

for 15 to 20 minutes to be on the red carpet

and she was very kind to give us that time.

You know, one of the things that I love

about reading Susan Sontag's thoughts on camp

was that things become camp over time.

So what we did with this,

that what Brandon and I thought was really a genius to do,

was he took us all the way,

sort of back to the Lower East Side,

by the end of me revealing all of these looks.

And it was just me and fishnets

with a sequined bra and panty,

which is the way that I used to perform.

I used to call it pop burlesque,

meaning our version of camp was the old me.

And I think this is, in some ways,

so indicative of the earlier things that we looked at.

If I could just, for a moment,

switch back to here.

To me, this really looks like

an elevated modern progression of where I used to be.

And this is my album cover,

Cecilio Castrillo Martinez is the designer.

Another designer on this garment is Gasoline Glamour

and Gary Fay did the fingers and the hands.

This was a creation of a glove,

actually, that had articulation.

So as I move my fingers, there was extended fingers

that had joints that moved like an alien.

And I couldn't have possibly walked in these shoes.

One of them, on the left side here,

this was about a nine-inch knife, a real knife.

And then, this was a horn here on the other side,

and the horn was longer than the shoe.

This is an exercise

in what I would love for people to understand

is really creating art with fashion

and it not being about it being functional

for everyday life

but about it being functional for art.

I love becoming art.

That's something I've said throughout my whole career.

So this is one of my favorite things I've ever worn.

I wore this Schiaparelli design

for the inauguration,

and nobody knows this,

but this is a bulletproof dress.

When I saw that golden dove,

I just knew that this was the right piece

and I knew Schiaparelli being an Italian fashion house,

it was something that I really, really wanted to do

from my heritage as an Italian-American woman

that would be singing for President 45 to be leaving

and to invite President 46 into office.

And I'll never forget speaking

to this young man that I was with.

And he was asking me if I was nervous and I said yes.

But sometimes fashion really can give you wings,

like a dove.

And speaking of Schiaparelli, here we are again.

This is from my most recent Vogue shoot

with the incredible Steven Meisel

that I have wanted to work with my entire career.

I try to act while I'm modelling.

When I saw this look, I thought it was whimsical

and I thought it was beautiful.

But when everything came together,

I felt that this type of privilege

and wealth was the epitome of evil.

So you can see it in my eyes in this picture

that this woman has no soul.

This being has no soul.

But the soul, I believe, resides

in the creation of this image

and all the artists that were part of it.

You were born

to be brave,

love. [pen scratching]

Looking back at all my looks,

it was actually very emotional.

All of these moments in my life

represent something very deep to me.

I felt so misunderstood for so long

that I was just the girl that loved to dress crazy.

I was just the girl that loved fashion

and that's all that I was.

And it felt really nice today

to revisit all of these outfits

and remember how particular I was about everything

and revisit also the artistic spirit of it.

You know, I do believe in art for art's sake.

I also believe in intentional art.

And I believe that you can, if you choose,

choose to live an artistic life

where art is every moment of your being

in every second of every day.

People say all the time that they think I hid in fashion

but I was never hiding.

I was screaming.

Thank you, Vogue.

[gentle inspirational music]