Meat Dress was created as an entry in the Miss Meat Market gown contest, the centerpiece of Restaurant Florent’s Bi-Decade(nt) Ball, held at the Roxy on October 22, 2005, to honor pioneering restaurateur Florent Morellet and to benefit the High Line. Florent had opened his eponymous restaurant two decades earlier in a former diner located in the Meatpacking District, then a fringe neighborhood known primarily for meat carcasses and leather bars. In 2000, Florent was instrumental in launching a campaign to have the pleasantly grimy neighborhood—with its trucks and warehouses and stench of meat juices—recognized as a historic district. The first phase of the High Line would open four years later, in 2009. Meat Dress comprises a bodice of woven raw bacon and a skirt of stitched salami slices. No mechanical fastenings were required, because the fat in the meat products causes them to naturally adhere to one another. Meat Dress won the top prize, besting entries designed by, among others, Alexander McQueen and Diane von Furstenberg, and it predated Lady Gaga’s own meat dress by five years.
