The Chocolate Fashion World’s Sweet Beginning
Imagine walking down a runway where the dress might melt before you reach the end. At the Salon du Chocolat in London, model Fiona Bitmead wore a dress made of 40 pounds of chocolate and had to worry about “a dress melting on me!” This isn’t some fever dream from a candy-obsessed designer – it’s the very real world of edible fashion. The Salon du Chocolat is a French creation that’s been running for 19 years and travels to 23 cities around the world, turning chocolate from dessert into haute couture. At these extraordinary events, Belgian chocolatiers and designers team up to create stunning, edible works of art, unveiled at the Salon Du Chocolat trade fair in Paris. The whole concept sounds ridiculous until you see it in action – then it becomes mesmerizingly beautiful. What started as a novelty has evolved into a legitimate art form that challenges everything we think we know about fashion and food.
The Meat Dress That Shocked the World
On September 12, 2010, American singer Lady Gaga wore a dress to the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards made entirely out of raw beef, designed by Franc Fernandez and styled by Nicola Formichetti. The dress wasn’t just shocking – it was revolutionary in ways nobody expected. Time voted the meat dress as its top fashion statement of 2010, beating out everything else that year. But here’s what most people don’t know: fashion designer Brandon Maxwell, who helped style the look, was actually a vegan at the time and had to wear “really long opera length gloves and a mask” just to work with it. The irony wasn’t lost on anyone involved. The dress was preserved by taxidermists as a type of jerky and is now displayed in Las Vegas at the Haus of Gaga museum inside the Park MGM casino.
The Technical Nightmare of Chocolate Couture
Creating a chocolate dress isn’t like sewing silk or cotton – it’s a race against time and temperature. Food artist Paul Wayne Gregory worked on constructing a dress that took 24 hours to hand-paint with chocolate, and the process “wasn’t without its meltdowns” with “a lot of melting, breaking and rebuilding”. Think about trying to tailor something that could literally disappear on a hot day. The biggest challenge is choosing fabrics that can support the weight and decoration of chocolate, requiring sturdy canvas that can withstand heavy chocolate coatings. When it came time to transport one dress, they had “two women holding it in the back of a van” because traditional garment bags simply wouldn’t work. The whole process is like trying to build a sandcastle in the rain – beautiful, but destined to be temporary.
Famous Chocolate Creations That Made History
The “Eternal Diamond” dress was an A-line creation hand-painted with 40 pounds of Lindt chocolate and adorned simply along the hem with chili and orange segments. This wasn’t just any chocolate dress – it was a collaboration between Swiss chocolatier Lindt and a young designer that pushed boundaries. The Eternal Diamond dress was a strapless confection of chocolate and chili weighing 50 kilos, created by Lauren Smith, winner of Graduate Fashion Week 2013, with Lindt as the chocolatier behind this eccentric masterpiece. Master chocolatier Mark Tilling used 10 pounds of chocolate squares to create an Audrey Hepburn-inspired dress and matching round handbag. Each piece tells a story about the intersection of culinary art and fashion, proving that clothes can be both beautiful and delicious.
The Raw Reality of Meat Fashion
While chocolate fashion might seem whimsical, meat fashion is visceral and confrontational. Designer Franc Fernandez was approached to create a meat purse for Lady Gaga, went to his local butcher in Granada Hills, and was told matambre (flank steak) would be best, purchasing about 40 pounds of Argentinian beef. The construction process was surprisingly methodical. The team made up the design as they went along since “there is not much plan you can do with such an organic material,” building the dress onto a corset using strong nylon thread, with the entire process taking two days. Unlike chocolate, meat doesn’t cooperate with fashion standards – it has its own timeline and demands. The dress challenged everyone involved, from the vegan stylist who had to handle raw beef to the audience who had to confront their own relationship with meat consumption.
When TV Shows Embrace Edible Challenges
Reality fashion shows like Project Runway have featured challenges where designers must create garments from “edible food items” in seasons 1, 4, and 10, proving that the concept has mainstream appeal beyond art galleries and avant-garde runways. These challenges push designers to think beyond traditional materials and consider how food can become fashion. The results are often surprising – contestants have created stunning pieces using everything from candy wrappers to actual fruits and vegetables. Designers are given a budgeted stipend and limited time to finish their designs, with the shortest being 5 hours and the longest being two or three days. What makes these challenges particularly fascinating is watching trained fashion designers grapple with materials that have their own expiration dates and structural limitations. It’s one thing to drape fabric – it’s another to work with ingredients that might spoil before the runway show.
The Art Gallery Treatment
The best runway shows now feature models in fancy dresses carrying wheels of cheese, and the Salon du Chocolat displays chocolatiers’ skills in elaborate presentations, from giant polar bears to recreations of the Eiffel Tower, with the best in the business molding sweet stuff into couture dresses. Museums and galleries have started taking edible fashion seriously as an art form. Lady Gaga loaned her meat ensemble to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where it’s displayed in their Women Who Rock exhibition, with the museum contacting her right after the VMAs about the dress and future plans. The shift from shock value to artistic recognition represents a major evolution in how we view the relationship between food and fashion. What was once considered a publicity stunt is now preserved in climate-controlled cases alongside other cultural artifacts. This institutional validation has opened doors for other artists to experiment with edible materials in serious artistic contexts.
The Preservation Problem
What happens to a dress made of perishable materials after the cameras stop rolling? Following Lady Gaga’s award show, the meat garment was placed in a meat locker, then a vat of chemicals and painted to counteract discoloration, and is now being exhibited as part of the museum’s Women Who Rock exhibition. The dress had to be preserved like beef jerky and transported in a climate-controlled truck, with the meat becoming “very hard” to the touch. The preservation process is almost as complex as creating the original piece. Chocolate presents different challenges – while it won’t rot like meat, it can melt, bloom with white spots, or attract pests. Think of it like preserving any other artwork, except your medium was originally meant to be consumed. The irony is that these “temporary” fashion statements often last longer than traditional garments because of the extreme preservation methods required.
Celebrity Reactions and Cultural Impact
Lady Gaga explained to Ellen DeGeneres that “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,” while DeGeneres, who was vegan at the time, later wrote about the difficulty of sitting next to someone wearing a meat outfit. The cultural conversation sparked by edible fashion goes far beyond the runway. When recently asked in a Vanity Fair lie detector test if she would ever wear raw beef as couture again, Gaga replied “I don’t think so, no,” but the test results were “inconclusive,” surprising even her. French chocolatier Jeffrey Cagnes created chocolate pieces including “a minidress inspired by Alexander McQueen with appliquĂ©d butterflies, a geometric gown seemingly inspired by Legos, a cowgirl hat, and a wedding gown,” even including a naked dress because “these creations were not only delicious, they were also on trend”. The fact that celebrities are willing to risk their reputations on edible fashion speaks to its power as both art and statement.
The Global Chocolate Fashion Scene
The Salon du Chocolat transforms Paris into a cocoa-lover’s paradise, bringing together the world’s greatest chocolate connoisseurs and pastry prodigies from 60 different countries for five days of tastings and workshops, with the Chocolate Fashion Show as the real showstopper where models wear nothing but chocolate-made designs. The show is a feast for the eyes and the palate, with around a dozen chocolate couture masterpieces taking center stage. What started in France has become a global phenomenon. At the 15th World Chocolate Fair in Paris, Belgian and French designers collaborated to create cocoa couture, including Virginie Stucki’s chocolate-studded dress and fan made by La Maison du Chocolat, and Belgian singer Lara Fabian wearing a dress designed by Herve Leger with Jean-Paul Hevin’s chocolatier expertise. Each year, the competition pushes artists to new creative heights, proving that chocolate can be shaped into almost any fashion silhouette imaginable. The international nature of these competitions has created a community of artists who share techniques and push each other’s boundaries.
What would you have guessed – that edible fashion would become a legitimate art form that museums preserve and international competitions celebrate?
