From Runway to Retail: How Food-Themed Fashion Reached a Tipping Point

There was a time, not too long ago, when carrying a purse shaped like a baguette felt like a thrilling—and even subversive—novelty in the fashion world. It was an amusing wink at everyday life, a playful disruption of traditional luxury codes. Today, however, consumers hardly bat an eye when encountering Moschino’s trompe l’œil celery purses, or stumbling upon a hot-dog-and-pretzel-print jumpsuit created by Big Bud Press in collaboration with a popular Los Angeles bar. This begs an unavoidable question for observers of contemporary culture: How did we get here, and has the intersection of food and fashion officially become a little too much?

Fashion has long found profound inspiration from the culinary world, but the recent influx of food-fueled prints, bold graphics, and edible, wearable trompe l’œil accessories that first picked up steam during the pandemic has now reached a definitive cultural tipping point. Today, there are countless examples of these culinary motifs and edible, wearable creations available at every conceivable price point.

The disparity in the market is striking. Loewe’s summer collection featured a $4,150 lambskin tomato clutch, while mass-market retail giant Walmart introduced a line of rotisserie chicken bag-like purses and charms starting at a mere $5.97. As with many modern consumer trends, this trajectory started on the high-fashion runway and methodically worked its way down to mass-market ubiquity.

In 2020, a chocolate chip cookie marched down one of New York Fashion Week’s most buzzed-about fall runways. Protruding realistically from a sleek black purse designed by Puppets and Puppets, the design quickly went viral for its whimsical inclusion of a classic dessert on a high-end handbag.

The then-emerging brand quickly made food a central theme of its creative vision. Its cake-topped aviator caps, Ferrero Rocher heels, and beeswax-sculpted cheese hats offered hyperrealistic, absurdist food designs capable of achieving instant social media virality. Prior to working in fashion, Puppets and Puppets designer Carly Mark worked as an artist whose pieces revolved around candies and snacks. As she noted in a 2023 interview with the Business of Fashion, the Puppets universe felt like an ideal pairing given what she considers to be the shared primary motivators of both food and fashion: pleasure and money.

During the pandemic lockdown years, the much-duped “strawberry dress” took over TikTok, while Tombolo Company found a major hit on its hands with its vongole shirt. Debuting in 2019, the seafood-themed shirt found its peak popularity in 2021. The garment appeared prominently in Vogue in 2020, and publication InsideHook called it an obvious bedfellow to day-drinks, rooftops, and weekenders—effectively cementing it as a contemporary status symbol.

Katie Kimmel’s hand-painted T-shirts made chicken-parm enthusiasm akin to being a devout sports fan, and by 2022, fashion publications were declaring “seafood kitsch” to be the definitive look of the summer as items like Rachel Antonoff’s popular seafood-tower dress flew off digital shelves.

Why was food so primed to become a dominant motif in clothing at this specific juncture in modern culture? One could make the argument that these trends have deep roots in the millennial optimism years. Earlier in the 2000s and 2010s, the concept of the “foodie” was newly minted. Brands printed tongue-in-cheek food- and coffee-related motifs and slogans—with a fervent love of avocados coming immediately to mind—on hipster apparel, as the idea that “you are what you eat” developed growing cultural fervor.

That period served as a crucial stepping stone in the evolution toward the far more elaborate and pervasive marketability of food-as-identity witnessed today. Cole Poska, a content creator who serves as a partner and creative director at Beyond Studios, notes that food brands possess something most corporate entities would kill for: decades of nostalgia, iconic identities, and consumers who are borderline obsessed with them.

Poska’s own social media channels frequently reimagine restaurant merchandise just for fun. His viral designs for Cheesecake Factory apparel included a hat that artfully resembles the chain’s iconic brown bread. He points out that people will defend their favorite fast-food order as fiercely as they would defend a family member, displaying a level of brand loyalty that is nearly impossible to artificially manufacture. The same intensity applies to a preferred martini order or a favorite local taco spot; it has all become a way of telling the world who we are through what we like to consume.

Yet, widespread cultural fatigue is undoubtedly setting in. In 2024, Bon Appétit posed a weary question to its readers: “Why Does Every Dress Have Pasta and Cocktail Shrimp on It?” And as the initial novelty factor of a shrimp-print dress has inevitably worn off, a larger question looms regarding whether there is any true longevity for these food-as-fashion moments.

Digital feeds continuously overflow with products hurriedly designed for flash-in-the-pan viral trends that are quickly destined for landfills. This disposable cycle is exacerbated when an object prioritizes shock value and cheap gimmicks over genuine function and thoughtful brand identity.

This phenomenon is intrinsically tied to the accelerated speed of modern trend cycles and increasingly shortened consumer attention spans. However, as journalist Leah Asmelash noted in a report for CNN, the rising costs of everyday food items also cast an increasingly complex and somber shadow over food-themed fashion.

By 2026, a $425 cardigan emblazoned with oysters carries far less originality than it did a few years prior. At best, it risks falling into banality; at worst, it evokes unsettling dystopian aesthetics, with the wearer seemingly signaling not just culinary appreciation, but financial comfort and guaranteed sustenance in an uncertain economic climate.

In that light, beyond its role as a vessel for personal identity, food has arguably transformed into a starker status symbol than ever before. A luxury sweater touting one’s love of caviar serves as shorthand for access to elite circles and an appreciation of high-end gastronomy. Conversely, sporting a mass-market, budget-friendly version purchased from overseas e-commerce platforms is viewed by fashion critics as more akin to wearing a blatantly counterfeit designer belt.

If it is possible to ultimately escape this sense of accelerated-trend-cycle disposability, brands may need to adopt a much more subtle approach than simply manufacturing a handbag that looks like a giant stick of butter.

Sam Salad is the co-founder of Meals, a Los Angeles-based, workwear-inspired apparel company that, by its own description, bakes food culture into everyday apparel, effectively blurring the lines between the clothes people wear and the food they consume. Utility remains at the forefront of the brand, which offers classic chef pants cut with a fuller silhouette, rendered in both basic colors and subdued aesthetic homages to blue cheese and watermelon.

When Meals launched in 2019, Salad was selling premium denim along Venice’s Abbot Kinney Boulevard, a noted hotbed of Instagram-friendly food culture and trendy restaurants like Gjelina that ultimately helped inspire his own creative vision. Design today, Salad observes, must successfully translate across multiple languages and digital platforms to resonate.

Food is hardly a novel bedfellow for fashion designers, even if today’s hyper-fast trend cycle has kicked the concept into overdrive. Food is fundamentally universal, Salad points out, noting historical precedents like Issey Miyake once merchandising a pleats collection as miniature omakase sets. He cites that collection alongside other iconic fashion-meets-food moments, such as the legendary lobster dress designed collaboratively by Salvador Dalí and Elsa Schiaparelli.

At the time of its 1937 creation, the dress was considered a scandal, representing a conformity-defying sartorial stance famously worn by Wallis Simpson. Decades later, mass-produced and heavily diluted iterations of similar concepts can be found online for a fraction of the cost.

As the industry stands, one clear path out of corny food-motif purgatory is for brands—whether rooted in fashion or gastronomy—to focus less on sheer quantity and much more on authentic storytelling and quality craftsmanship. Producing fewer, better things remains a sustainable philosophy, Salad suggests, drawing a parallel to the enduring, uncomplicated business model of burger chain In-N-Out.

Poska shares a strikingly similar philosophy regarding modern design integrity. He emphasizes a preference for creating a single item that people discuss for an entire year over churning out twenty forgettable items that vanish from public memory by tomorrow. As he notes, the first person to make a candle look like a stick of butter is a visionary, whereas the hundredth person is simply making another candle.