Do feed the models: when haute couture meets haute cuisine

The fashion, food, and beauty industries are becoming more intertwined, as brand and collection launches become increasingly immersive. Scrolling through social media and flipping through Vogue, stylish people are sitting down to dramatically set tables as often as fashion show front rows. Chefs are dipping into modeling and donning fashionable workwear.

Until recently, it seemed that fashion and beauty were industries hostile to food, focused more on as little food consumption as possible (the slogan Don't Feed the Models comes to mind). Now studios are springing up globally specifically catering to the fashion and beauty set and collaborations between food and fashion brands, peddling not merch, but serious collections. Food-themed accessories have moved beyond kitsch. Moschino is selling a bread-shaped faux leather clutch bag for $1495 USD. A Saint Laurent leather takeaway bag purse retails for $1900 USD.

The intersection of fashion and food has provoked no small amount of recent commentary, such as an exhibition at the Fashion Institute of Technology, which showed clothing printed with food themes and fashioned from fabrics derived from food, like bananas and pineapples, as pioneers from both industries start to discuss how waste from one can become materials for the other.

Throughout fashion, food is trending. I spoke with some of the most recognizable faces operating in this curious intersection.

Top models like Gisele Bundchen are releasing cookbooks and creating food brands, like Chrissy Teigen and Karlie Kloss. Nara Smith, easily the most famous person cooking on TikTok, has in recent months, donned fantastical couture as she makes lasagna soup, cookies, and kimchi-jjigae from scratch.

Conversely, conjure up a stereotypical chef and you might think of butchery-themed arm tattoos and tight white t-shirts (thanks in no small part to The Bear), but now we’re starting to see chefs in couture, far outside the kitchen. Jon Kung glowers in a Helmut Lang campaign (pictured top), Sophia Roe models Polo Ralph Lauren and La Ligne, and Woldy Reyes, chef and founder of boutique catering company Woldy Kusina, beams in a J.Crew photo spread.

14 years ago, Reyes worked in fashion editorial, for the brand Philip Lim, and then, for a stylist, creating images through clothes. Eventually, he changed careers, cooking privately for a fashion designer and catering backstage for fashion events and press previews.

He crafts vivid, plant-based kamayans, skewers baguettes with whimsical arrays of cocktail picks stacked with peppers, and strings pani puri up in gravity-defying towers. “When I first started in food in 2016, I was mostly behind the scenes. I wanted the food to speak for itself,” says Reyes. Reyes made his way in front of the camera during the pandemic and found himself making food for fashion spreads, and modeling the clothes, too.

“Food creates culture. Fashion and luxury brands want to tap into that,” says Reyes. And he anticipates much more intersection between food and fashion, since, “we are at [a time for the] multi-hyphenate person. And chefs are multi-hyphenates these days.”

Social media was the catalyst for other chef creators’ forays into fashion, like Jon Kung, who when he first started cooking, never thought there would be any crossover between worlds, “outside of catering a shoot or event.” The creative director of Helmut Lang reached out to him over Instagram, and suddenly, Kung was on a plane to New York to model.

When the shoe brand Clove first approached Nok Suntaranon, well known outside of the kitchen as a devotee of Hermes scarves and Issey Miyake matching sets, she told them, “You can’t afford me.” But she agreed to be the face of their campaign. “After seeing how Nok Suntaranon styled Clove shoes at her restaurant over the last three years, it was such an organic moment to cast her in our SuperCush campaign,” says Joe Ammon, Clove’s CEO and a regular at Kalaya, Suntaranon’s Philadelphia restaurant.

Two years ago, I wrote about how trends like Barbiecore and Coastal Grandma married food with specific fashion and design aesthetics, fueled by social media. What we’re seeing this year differs from those straightforward, all-encompassing trends. Dinners seem to be supplanting runways, and fashion houses are opening restaurants both permanent, like New York’s Le Cafe Louis Vuitton, a collaboration with Philadelphia-based restaurateur Stephen Starr that opened November 15 of this year, and ephemeral. “Private and event chefs have blown up because it’s so much fun for a fashion brand to rent an apartment or warehouse and really make it their party rather than say, a 16-person dinner at a restaurant,” says Rebecca King, a Los Angeles-based private chef and agent who now places chefs for fashion and beauty brand events.

“The brand will send us a deck, portfolio, or their fashion week looks. Right now it’s fall so burgundy, deep wine colors, brown. We’d make pickled onions and beets, tuna, cured salmon with purple cabbages. Both fashion and food are seasonal and it’s really easy to match the colors,” says King.

“Brands want to curate experiences and really want them to feel like their moment,” says King. They’re also paying closer attention to produce. “When it comes to tablescapes, it’s goodbye flowers, hello cabbage.”

Tenoch, the restaurant at Paradero Todos Santos in Baja California, has become a darling of fashion and beauty brands, to co-founder Joshua Kremer’s surprise. Its menu celebrates Baja’s diverse ecosystem, with shimmery pink local kanpachi fanned out over obsessively plated tostadas and fried soft shell crabs gesticulating from a bed of green herbs pressed into a taco. Guests enjoy these against a stunning desert backdrop, where architects have interspersed mirrors with giant cacti.

“What’s great about our space and totally unintentional is that the palette is so muted that any brand that showcases here really pops,” says Kremer, who has, in the last three years, hosted a staggering roster of luxury fashion and beauty brands, from Giorgio Armani, to Jean Paul Gaultier and Narciso Rodríguez. Fashion houses bring their VIP customers to the relatively remote Paradero to disconnect and focus on the launch of their new collections, while eating food grown on the property and pulled from the nearby ocean. Kremer has done no outreach to brands, but he has been selective with clients. “We’ve said no to many brands that don’t represent what our values are,” he says, as the restaurant has refused to serve products like sugary sodas and junk food and won’t host brands that want to bring them in.

“Engagement with fashion moved from billboards to media and then social media. There’s so much stuff you’re bombarded with every single day, but here where there are no TVs and you’re just in nature, brands can bring their VIPs, disconnect with the world, and engage with them in person,” says Kremer. The connections made over the internet are solidified over dinners at places like Tenoch. Fashion and beauty brands have found new ways for customers to consume and live their designs.

Just as Clove recognizes the importance of style at traditionally unstylish jobs and maintains that “shoes are the ultimate vessel for self-expression – we have created ‘jewelry’ for your feet while also supporting the job you need to do,” says Ammon, so too does Ellen Marie Bennett, the founder of apron company Hedley & Bennett. But this was not always the case.

“Back in the day, I felt like we had to do serious business aprons because so many people thought I was just a little apron company. I was like you’re missing the point. This is about people having dignity and pride in the kitchen, you turkeys. Now I feel like we have the permission to make cute aprons. We earned it,” says Bennett.

Hedley & Bennett’s latest collaboration, with fashion brand LoveShackFancy, has produced functional, professional aprons that look like nothing I’ve ever seen before. They are indeed very cute. One is trimmed with pink, wavy ribbon. “That’s rickrack,” Bennett informs me. “We had to figure out how to do that. We had to find a way to get their print and apply it to our fabric, as we control the material.” Collaborating with a brand known for its delicate floral patterns was far from easy.

“When I first looked up LoveShackFancy, I thought, that’s the antithesis of Hedley & Bennett. It really pushed us out of our comfort zone. But I love shocking people. I love when it’s two people you’d never imagine getting together and dating and they become the coolest new couple. And that’s how I thought of this collaboration.”

“I would love to do a Gucci apron and a Celine apron,” declares Bennett. Maybe those are next.

“I get my inspiration outside from my own world, so I always look to fashion, and now fashion is looking to food.”