Vanitas, but Make It Fashion

With Fashion Week happening this time of the year and our consumer senses itching, let’s discuss the futile nature of material goods.

Vanitas, a Latin term meaning “emptiness” or “worthlessness”, is a traditional Christian view that marks earthly products and pursuits — as being of vanity. In visual art, a vanitas is a symbolic artwork showing the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death.

Pieter Claesz’s “Vanitas — Still Life” (1625) Google Images

Paul Cézanne’s “Still Life With Skull” (ca. 1895–1900) Google Images

Paul Cézanne’s “The Basket of Apples” (ca. 1895) Google Images

Still lifes are marked with flowers, rotting fruit (decay), and skulls (certainty of death), where these objects are presented to remind viewers of their morality and the emptiness of worldly possessions.

Henri Matisse’s “Still Life with a Pewter Jug and Pink Statuette” (1910) Google Images

Roy Lichtenstein’s “Pop Objectivity” Google Images

The concept of Vanitas has been interpreted very differently in contemporary context, artists incorporating non-traditional materials and displaying postmodern subject matter.

Tjalf Sparnaay’s “Big Burger” Google Images

Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party” (1979) Google Images

But this particular work by Canadian artist Jana Sterbak entitled Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic (1987) stands out as the most literal and fashionable of vanitas.

Jana Sterbak’s “Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic” (1987) Google Images

The dress is made with 50–60 pounds of raw flank steaks sewn together, opening up dialogues on human conditions, vanity, and decomposition. The images below display its decay process.

It was among a series of controversial works exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada in the 1980s and 1990s. The show drew national controversy, receiving criticism from Members of Parliament, as well as food banks and soup kitchens’ organizers. The artwork was considered an insult, given the 1990s recession.

And the manikin dress has since become a notable reference, popularized by Lady Gaga at the 2010 MTV Music Video Awards, as she famously says in an interview that “dead meat is dead meat”.

Lady Gaga wearing “Meat Dress” designed by Franc Fernandez at the 2010 MTV Music Video Awards

Now displayed at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

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