Billboard Music Awards: Style of The Year

A memory-searing spectacle of looks lit up the music landscape this year, along with a few that fizzled. As the Billboard Music Awards approaches, we chart the era of the meat dress, and other prime cuts.

Everything Lady Gaga wore this past year -- including the infamous meat she draped herself in at the MTV video Music Awards, and the giant egg she emerged from at the Grammys -- was, at the very least, something to look at. Or eat, perhaps, if you had been trapped in a Chilean mine long enough.

For pop stars, it was a year of fashion extremes. From the hourglass curves and Little Mermaid hair on Katy Perry to the alien brain/coral formation wigs on Nicki Minaj to the fashion non-statements made by Susan Boyle, a lot of eye candy competed for the attention of music lovers. Unsurprisingly, the game belonged to Lady Gaga, the gravitational core of the music world's visual information, around whom all others were thrown into a reactionary orbit.

At last, Lady Gaga (see her outrageous outfits gallery) got over clothing herself in discarded Madonna skins. Madonna, after all, had always made her bones by picking up the trailing edge of the sexual avant garde (vogueing, lesbian flirtation, black PVC boots) and dragging it kicking and screaming into the mainstream. La Gaga reanimated it all some two decades later, but first she pulled out all of the overtly sexual teeth from the old looks in order to subvert Madonna's flirty, kitten-punk impact, and make it more scary-art-creature-y.

In true magpie fashion, Ms. Germanotta collects shiny bits from an ever-widening gallery of sources. She's gleaned inspiration from Matthew Barney's Cremaster series, vegas-space-alien and 1980s club-kid looks, and fashion delicacies from the likes of Philip treacy and the late Alexander McQueen (Gaga so admires Treacy's millinery work that last May, she sent him her resume in a bid to spend the summer as his unpaid intern. Mr. Treacy, it appears, was not so comfortable with the idea of Gaga fetching his coffee). in a recent gambit, Gaga sported jutting, warthog-esque bone "implants" in her cheeks and shoulders-a direct reference to radical French performance artist orlan, whose work has centered on extreme plastic surgery and facial modification for decades.

Following close behind Gaga's attention-strangling tail feathers, Nicki Minaj (see her outrageous outfits gallery) has also endeavored to make her fashion a relevant extrusion of her music act. For the 2010 American Music Awards, Ms. Minaj wore a Manish Arora dress that looked like the Faberge sarcophagus Donatella versace will eventually be encased in when she is shot into space. in the language of the true fashionista, Minaj claimed the look to be "the dress version" of her album, "Pink Friday."

NEXT PAGE: Justin Bieber Gets A Haircut, Rihanna's Love Of Designer Elie Saab