I knew the meat dress became passe when Bruce Willis decides to pay homage to Lady Gaga by wearing a hat made out of beef on “Late Show with David Letterman.”
The same man who took out terrorists with his bare hands as detective John McClane in the explosion-happy film “Die Hard” is now resorting to marinating his head with the beefy and bloody token shock value of the present, all the while making lukewarm jokes. Also, he made Letterman eat a bit of his hat. I only hope that that was when the meat meme died.
We can all thank Lady Gaga for this forcible fashion as food poisoning. When Lady Gaga rolled down the red carpet at the MTV Video Music Awards last month in her beef gown designed by Franc Fernandez, in all its muscle and tendon glory, all I could think of were the inevitable flies and ensuing rancidness. Ridiculousness piled upon ridiculousness when I read on MTV News that the dress would be preserved as beef jerky.Mere days after the VMAs, designer Jeremy Scott marched down dresses made of fake prosciutto in his 2011 spring runway show.
As an admitted carnivore, I am still unsettled to see fabric replaced by the flesh and hides of cow. I can’t stomach raw meat and fashion, take or leave the pun. I wasn’t only perturbed by the corpulence of such fashion but its blatant and exploitive shock value.
Sure, Gaga is a fashion rabble rouser, what with her Kermit the Frog outfit and dresses involving planetary rings. But as soon as she opened the Pandora’s freezer of meat fashions, out came celebrities on talk shows cashing in on the guaranteed shock value, from actress Kate Walsh wearing a dress made of sushi on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” to the aforementioned Willis’ beef toupee.
Fashion and Student Trends board member McKenzie Dowler said that food as fashion could be a work of art. That was the case when Lady Gaga appeared on the latest issue of Vogue Japan in a sirloin bikini, which looked artfully arranged and edited in a sort of way that would appear in an international Vogue. But sitting on a couch in front of a live audience with an outfit made out of food that probably would be melting under the hot lights of a television set is not art. It’s called publicity.
Granted, I don’t expect this trend to be mainstream, as if I’d see some poor child and Lady Gaga devotee ambling in the middle of Bruin Walk with a vest made out of bacon. I mean I’ve seen the weekly ads at Ralphs on Weyburn Avenue, and $3.99 a pound for sirloin adds up when trying to construct an entire garment made of the stuff. To be realistic, beef shouldn’t and probably would never be the new leopard print or the new any print.
Seeing it as an exploitive factor in the realm of celebrity just becomes ad nauseum to the point that perhaps this is Lady Gaga’s most extreme trick in her fashion handbook.
However, she’d probably prove me wrong in a few days by wearing a lobster shell jumpsuit.
If you also think beef should be eaten instead of worn, e-mail Jue at tjue@media.ucla.edu.