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The Romance Between Food & Fashion
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IMAGE: Jennifer Rubell's cotton candy padded cell turns confinement into a food funhouse
This past fall, fashion fell hard for food. In September, Lady Gaga famously wore a dress made entirely of meat to the VMA’s. Two months later, Barneys New York announced its legendary holiday windows would feature not the usual lineup of favorite designers - but, instead, the stars of the Food Network. Hipster clothing label Band of Outsiders maintains a spirited blog devoted entirely to reviewing cookies (slogan: “If you don’t like cookies you might not have a soul”). A recent episode of Top Chef found contestants competing for the first time based on plating only, not taste. Marc Jacobs is rumored to have a permanent standalone eatery in the works.
And now, fashion's love for food blooms. Last Thursday, in celebration of New York fashion week, the high holy herself, Martha Stewart, proclaimed that food is the new fashion in a piece on the Huffington Post. Noting a marked shift in the role that food plays in our lives and culture, Stewart posed that food has “become a signifier of style.” We couldn’t agree more. In fact, we’ve been saying that for ages.
Here at HartmanSalt, food and fashion seem like an intuitive pairing, our daily reads ranging from street food and street style to modernist cuisine and experimental garb. To some, the idea of foodie fashionistas may be a bit counter intuitive. But you can toss out the tired jokes about starving models and sample sizes. Everyone has to eat eventually. And lately, it’s all about getting down to basics (fresh, local, seasonal) while experimenting with the seemingly impossible (farm-to-table handbags and liquidless cocktails, anyone?).
The romance between food and fashion has sparked more than a handful of blogs, each featuring a tempting combination of rich visuals and strong narratives. One such webzine, Luxirare, has this to say about the similarities between clothes and cuisine:
The pattern of consumption concerning the two are parallel, both operating on a devotion to hedonism, both running on the constant reinvention or update of current trends. Both require intimacy; food is consumed by the mouth and clothing must touch the body.
What’s in your pantry or on your plate has evolved into valuable forms of self-expression. Looking at food through the lens of fashion this is magnified, with consumers redefining what constitutes a quality food experience through numerous creative outlets. Food blogging has exploded in the past few years, with gastronomically inclined consumers taking to the Internet to share their passions. Then, of course, there is the endless collective fascination with the aforementioned Food Network celebrities (providing fodder for one of our favorite episodes of South Park late last year). And what do most reality shows center around these days but food, fashion and love?
All this passion and dialogue makes for some bold experimentation. On the more extreme end of the spectrum, our thoughts turn to the rise of technoemotional cuisine. Images from Nathan Myhrvold’s upcoming 2,400 page manifesto on the subject could easily be mistaken for high-art fashion photography. The six-volume set, packaged in Lucite and listed at over six-hundred dollars, is a testament to a movement driven by both scientific exploration and dreamy aesthetics. From the Modernist Cuisine blog:
It is important to note that for every remarkable shot that graces the pages of Modernist Cuisine, someone on the kitchen team spent hours making it work, often by doing something many people would consider crazy.
Call it what you will — molecular gastronomy, technoemotional cuisine, modernist cooking — chefs are increasingly applying food science technology and design principles to reinvent basic notions of food, flavor and texture.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We would never suggest putting form over function. Indeed, we urged companies not to abandon fresh and quality over technology in our white paper on technoemotional cuisine last year. Even the most fantastical creations are built from — and often inspired by — exceptional materials. Just as with fashion, technoemotional cuisine begins with the highest possible quality of ingredients. The concept of fresh and technoemotional may seem strange bedfellows initially, but the two could not be more complimentary. Both are sprung from the same indigenous impulse, to create the most compelling, engaging food experiences of the highest quality possible, limited only by the human imagination.
What better example of combining fresh basics with forward-thinking experimentation than a butcher grounded in performance art? The process of creating food and clothing is quite similar, as both require strong cutting techniques that eventually lead to new creations. Practiced knife skills meet the avant-garde in Jennifer Rubell, the Vegetable Butcher at Mario Batali’s newly opened Eataly (a fashionable food theatre all its own). Rubell, who hails more from the art world than the farmer’s market, is a food installation artist well practiced in the art of pushing epicurean and stylistic boundaries. For example, she once constructed an entire padded cell from over 1,600 cones of cotton candy as an epic dessert to an elaborately themed dinner. Rubell’s involvement with Eataly is part performance, part function. Carrots are peeled, artichokes are trimmed, but with a focus more reminiscent of a trip to the tailor than the grocery store. We guarantee your local supermarket doesn’t have a vegetable butcher. Well, unless you’re shopping at Eataly, where just as in fashion, the line between art and commerce is blurred.
There is always a skilled method behind Rubell’s foodie madness. That 20-foot tall pinata of Andy Warhol’s head filled with Hostess snacks didn’t build itself, you know. The exploratory passion with which Rubell approaches food speaks again to the overall parallels between the two worlds:
I look at my life as having very few meals left. However many thousands of meals that is, it's a finite number, and I don't want to waste any of it on something that's not teaching me, something that's not inspiring me in any way.
Inspiration and individuality are key when telling the story of how fashion and food found each other. Both worlds celebrate beauty. Both mark the seasons and embrace reinvention. And while the latest trend in food may in fact be predicting food trends, our signs point to the relationship between food and fashion being a lasting one, rooted in deep devotion to experimentation and driven by a collective cultural passion for self-expression.