There can be a hundred people in a press junket, and if just one of them is Lady Gaga, she’s getting ready to drop an absolutely berserk soundbite.

Less than a week into the media mill of House of Gucci and Gaga has claimed to have lived as her character (Patrizia Gucci) for nine entire months, never once slipping out of her italo-saxon drawl. In an interview with British Vogue she added that if she wasn’t a pop star, she would have been a combat journalist. Then, during a later press conference, Gaga described driving past the site of Maurizio Gucci’s death and feeling “a pin drop in (her) stomach”, as she questioned “what have I done?” because, internally, she had actually become Patrizia. Whether or not any of those things are even true is superfluous. After all, this is from a woman who allegedly spent three days isolating in a Hussein Chalayan “vessel” in preparation for the 2011 VMAs.

In a video for Vogue’s Life In Looks, Gaga relays the inspiration behind that womb-like structure and 19 of her most memorable fashions – including the meat dress, which she wore to the VMAs in 2010. As she tells the camera, ahead of the award ceremony, Gaga gathered her creative team to figure out if they might want want to make a “statement”. They discussed LGBT+ activists pushing to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, when Gaga suddenly remembered that Val Garland, her makeup artist, once wore a dress made of sausages to a party. Before long, she had the (mostly vegan) Haus of Gaga suturing raw flanks of steak into corsets, berets, and heels – “because I thought to myself if we were willing to die for your country, what does it matter how you identify.”

“It smelt like meat, it was thrilling to wear,” Gaga said of the evening. The dress has since been made into “beef jerky” and remains in Gaga’s possession, though it briefly went on display at The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s Women Who Rock exhibition in 2015. Flick through some of the musician’s most outrageous Born This Way looks here and the best of her House of Gucci costumes below.