Lady Gaga's Latest Food Fetish: Not NEARLY as Cool as the Meat Dress

What's so weird? This is how I arrive at the office every day.

Nothing will ever top the Meat Dress.

Know how I know that? Because all I have to do is write the words "Meat Dress" and you all know exactly what I'm talking about: last year's VMA's, where Lady Gaga wore a dress made entirely out of meat, and somehow managed to spin it into a rant about celebrity, women's issues, and Don't Ask/Don't Tell legislation. I loved her Meat Dress so much that I actually posted a list of all the various reasons why I thought it was awesome--including the fact that talking about it gave me the opportunity to use the phrase "prosciutto underpants" in public without anyone looking at me funny.

But last night, Gaga went to the food-as-fashion well again, this time making it all about the egg. And the results were . . . less than spectacular.

Because, really--once you do the Meat Dress, you've pretty much shot your sartorial wad, I would think. There's nowhere to go but down. What's cooler, stranger, and more daring than a dress (or, say, a tuxedo) made out of raw meat? Not some kind of strange egg-thing, that's for sure. Not a yellow latex gym outfit and a Sunday hat like a yolk.

Not for nothing, but the Meat Dress set a pretty high bar. It was the fashion equivalent of hitting someone in the face with a brick. And it was all deliberate, too. Here's Gaga, from an interview last night on 60 Minutes (and transcribed by The Stir):

"Part of it is getting people to pay attention to what you want them to pay attention to and not to pay attention to what you don't want them to pay attention to . . . I art-direct every moment of my life . . . People take me both way too seriously and not seriously enough."

But the egg dress (which doesn't even warrant capital letters) just didn't have that kind of juice. Which I know because, while I didn't watch last year's VMA's, I knew about the Meat Dress by 8:00 the next morning. There was no avoiding the news tsunami. I didn't watch the Grammys either (for which the egg-capsule and yolk dress were designed), but it took until well after noon before the food-and-fashion chatter rose to the level where I actually noticed it. And four hours in the digital, celebrity-obsessed world in which we live? That's like forever.

Anyway, maybe I'm wrong about this. I'm not exactly a fashionable fella, so maybe there was something to this whole egg thing that went beyond the heavy-handed symbolism--some element that went completely over my head. But all I know is that seeing her being carried around in that giant egg and checking out the snaps of her totally tame yellow dress just make me pine for the good old days when our celebrities all talked crazy and dressed in meat.