Fashion's new status symbol?

Fashion and beauty's new appetite for collaborating with food brands collides with a worrying return to '90s-era thinness and the mass uptake of new weightloss drugs. Divya Venkataraman breaks down the contradiction.

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How do you sell a skirt to a woman who's bombarded with advertising from her first social media scroll of the morning to the last flick-through before she goes to sleep? According to the fashion advertising credo of the moment, you make it look good enough to eat. Fashion is having a love affair with food: from Jacquemus-branded sticks of butter, to fruit and vegetables at Loewe, and photogenic chefs spruiking brands the way models once did, the edible is king. There's hunger in our eyes, and it's not just for the newest Alaïa Le Teckel bag colourway, or for a sneak peek of the latest no-phones-allowed The Row show. This is more carnal.

The spring/summer 2025 collections were ripe with food-inspired imagery, from banana-printed silk sets at Jacquemus to fried egg brooches at Moschino and slip dresses decorated with entire table settings at Marco Rambaldi. Meanwhile, in March, Saint Laurent opened a sushi restaurant at its Rive Droite store in Paris, and beauty mogul Hailey Bieber launched a collaboration with Fila with a campaign featuring her carrying grocery bags overflowing with fresh produce.

Perhaps part of the appeal is how fashion and food can be both mundane and extraordinary: they are everyday necessities, but they can be elevated to the level of beauty, of high craft, of sensory magic. In this way, they are natural compatriots. Balancing a soft brown blush atop a pillowy toasted marshmallow (à la Rhode) creates a semiotic association that trades on the qualities of the food, and allows the appeal of the marshmallows - soft, sweet, comforting - to imprint on the product itself. “[The pairing of fashion and food is] like a manifestation of ‘little treat’ culture,” says Elizabeth Goodspeed, a graphic design expert and cultural commentator. “You treat yourself to a pastry, so why not treat yourself to this diamond necklace, too?