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.”