Rock Hall installs Lady Gaga’s meaty dress
By Rich Heldenfels
Akron Beacon Journal
CLEVELAND
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum got meatier on Thursday.
The notorious Argentinian-beef dress Lady Gaga wore at the MTV Video Music Awards in September 2010 was added to the hall’s Women Who Rock exhibition.
The outfit caused a stir at the time — and still does. When the Hot in Cleveland cast got a sneak peek at the red-and-black dress and matching footwear on Wednesday night, the reaction was mixed.
“These two were taking pictures,’’ said Wendie Malick, pointing at Valerie Bertinelli and Jane Leeves.
But Malick “wasn’t crazy about it,’’ Bertinelli said. “She’s a vegetarian.’’
Lady Gaga herself has said the dress, created with designers Franc Fernandez and Nichola Formichetti, was not a commentary on eating (or not eating) meat, but on human rights.
“If we don’t stand up for what we believe in, and if we don’t fight for our rights, pretty soon we’re going to have as much rights as the meat on our bones,’’ she has said, according to a rock hall announcement. “And I am not a piece of meat.’’
Whatever its intent, the costume has sparked comment.
The hall had wanted to have Lady Gaga memorabilia in Women Who Rock (and there are several Gaga items besides the meat dress). Not only has she had enormous commercial success with songs like “Bad Romance” and the inescapable “Born This Way,” but she has also attracted attention with her flamboyant visual style.
“The first impression that one gets of Lady Gaga is, I think, all about the image, the outrageous outfits, the outrageous things that she says,’’ said Meredith Rutledge, assistant curator.
“She’s got a really engaging and important kind of message about community, about acceptance, about self-acceptance and people who may feel they are outsiders. She’s creating a community for them. And, just on a very basic level, she has so much talent and is entertaining. ... Just going to a Gaga show and being entertained is a wonderful thing.’’
Then came the dress. “It created such a stir in the office the next day [after the telecast], we were all, ‘We’ve got to get the dress,’’’ Rutledge said.
Its inclusion at the hall has caused even more interest, with national reports about it, as well as curiosity about the logistics. How does a costume made of 20 pounds of raw meat remain intact for about nine months already, then stay in shape for the exhibition’s run into February 2012?
The hall does handle with care. It treats items as works of art, for example, with the staff wearing gloves when installing them. And it has dealt with fragile objects before, including old papers and leather objects. But meat’s another matter.
“The most challenging was the preservation of it,’’ said Jun Francisco, director of collections management at the hall. “No one has done something similar before. There have been meat dresses before ... but they allowed them to deteriorate naturally.
“This one, they were actually asking us if we could do the same thing, but we said no, we can’t have it rotting in the museum. It would attract bugs and have this awful smell. ... We couldn’t allow that.’’
Lady Gaga’s people had been keeping the outfit in a meat-locker-like storage facility before the rock hall came on the scene in November. But how to display it in rock-hall surroundings?
‘’Franc Fernandez, the designer, came up with the idea of taxidermy,’’ Francisco said. The outfit was dipped in a combination of formaldehyde, detergent, distilled water and “some other chemicals that the taxidermist doesn’t want to divulge. It’s a trade secret.’’