Why Does Every Dress Have Pasta and Cocktail Shrimp on It?

It started with shrimp—the summer of “seafood kitsch” in 2022. Then the pasta puffer kept us warm during the winter of 2023. Beaded bags started to look like trendy tins of fish you’d bring back from your Euro summer. Aperol spritzes and plates of pasta were stitched onto dresses, and Spanish luxury brand Loewe took the heirloom tomato from the farmers market to must-have clutch.

Now, two years later, it feels like every fashion retailer has some selection of “gourmand garments” and accessories, as Chefanie owner Stephanie Nass calls them. Rachel Anotonoff knits chards onto tank tops, every Lisa Says Gah dress is covered in a patchwork of appetizers, and Kate Spade’s collaborating with Heinz to splatter ketchup across bags and shoes. A chic outfit isn’t just something you wear to the aperitivo spot. The apertivo is also literally embroidered on your shirt. Even if there’s no table for you at Bar Pisellino, everyone knows you’ve got exquisite taste in brine-y snacks because you’ve got olives on your pants.

Take a look at any charm necklace site and you’ll likely see a whole section dedicated to food charms. Kelsey Armstrong, creative director and founder of Haricot Vert remembers releasing a mermaid collection of charms that included tuna cans and sardines. “The tuna earrings were the ones that everybody wanted,” Armstrong says.

At first the reason for the fixation seems obvious: Food is a “talisman of personal identity,” as associate curator of costume at the Museum at FIT Elizabeth Way puts it. “How you eat is like a slash sexual orientation,” says chef Sophia Roe. “Like, ‘Hi, I’m Sophia, I’m gay, and I eat bread a lot.’ It’s just another way to explain who you are.” Food illustrator Marianna Fierro compared it to wearing a band T-shirt.

When Fierro designed a custom scarf with Echo for the brand’s 100th anniversary, she looked for something that represented her Italian childhood and eventually took inspiration from a Barilla box, leaning into the bold blue and gold colors and the quirky shape of the pasta. Food is the ultimate intersection of personal and cultural identity.

We refer to what we like as “taste,” and these pieces of food fashion quite literally illustrate and reflect who we are. “I think it really resonates with customer’s passions and inspirations,” says Lisa Says Gah CEO and founder Lisa Bühler in reference to her brand’s recent food collections. “It’s a bit [of] what your life is reflecting with what you’re doing—meeting up with friends or going to restaurants or traveling.”

Way and her colleague Melissa Marra-Alvarez illustrated a long historical precedent for this trend when they curated the Museum at FIT’s “Food & Fashion” exhibition and book last year. Food, Way notes, has always been a method of signaling something about an individual or group. Food and fashion have always been a “form of soft power,” says Marra-Alvarez, curator of education and research at the Museum at FIT—a way to demonstrate influence by saying “I have enough culture and taste to possess this thing.”

Food has always been a part of fashion—brocade vine embellishments on robes, the ubiquitous retro cherry print—but the foods we choose to depict on the clothes at the particular period reflects our current fixations. “It’s still expressions of creativity, of sustainability, or of cultural representation,” Marra-Alvarez says. “But it’s how they get expressed and how they change over time that is unique to each decade or each cultural moment.”

So what does it say about us now? The current fascination with seafood and tinned fish indicate a cultural turn toward frivolity and abundance. “It's very in your face,” Fierro laughs. “The moment that you're illustrating food—it’s not so serious.” The 2020s version of food on fashion is maximalist, bold, and even a little frivolous, in Stephanie Nass’s opinion. The Balenciaga 2023 Lays Potato chip bag, for example, is the ultimate high/low combination, but also a perfect demonstration of excess. Food and clothing used to be essentials for survival—now they’ve come together as things to enjoy. They're objects of spectacle.

On the packaged food space, direct-to-consumer Shoppy Shop brands design condiments and bottles of oil specifically to be seen on Instagram—so it only feels natural that some of those brands have collaborated with luxury fashion brands. There’s the Staud and Monte collab, Fishwife and Lisa Says Gah, the Sweetgreen and Susan Alexandra collab, and even Heinz and Kate Spade.

And then there’s the very obvious consumption metaphor. Food and fashion serve our collective ravenous purchasing appetites in this time of quick-moving trends. When you put them together, you’ve got the ultimate consumer culture collab.

“We’re living Andy Warhol’s biggest dream—the intersection of the mundane grocery item with the feeling of a luxury item,” says Snaxshots founder Andrea Hernández. “I like to call it affordable luxury or the new lipstick effect. These grocery items themselves become a way of signaling something.”

So how long will the trend last? Food on clothing has seemed to have more staying power than, say, checkerboard patterns or bike shorts. We’ve seen it move into the home decor, with the Bearaby Crinkle Cuddler pillow in the shape of a crinkle cut fry or the corn stool that promptly sold out after getting featured in Emma Chamberlain’s home tour. Roe even says she’s started to see it in make-up. Either way, she doesn’t think this is a bubble that’s popping any time soon.

“It's exciting to live in a world where people are excited to talk about what they like to eat,” Roe says. “And it's so exciting that they're wearing a Rachel Antonoff dress that has a blanket and cocktail shrimp on it.”