The Taste Test: Why Fashion Can’t Stop Playing With Its Food

Tomatoes, pasta, ice cream, butter. Not exactly the visual language you’d expect from a luxury campaign. And yet, here they are. Lurking between handbags and hemlines, melting down perfume bottles, sliding off the edge of a plate. 

The shift isn’t random. Fashion is hungry again—but not for clothes. For sensation. For tension. For that soft, slippery space where want becomes need, and a meal starts to feel like foreplay. This isn’t food styling. It’s seduction strategy. 

Fashion and dining, fashion and cocktails. It’s just natural: carefully picked attire and social gathering at the table. These two world intersected each other for a long time. Now they have a baby. A beautiful marketing baby.

Jacquemus Knew You’d Want to Lick It

When Jacquemus first started threading food into his universe, it was cheeky. Cherries. Toasted bread. Butter. Empty pasta plates. But it was never just about aesthetic contrast.

It was about triggering something more primal.

He doesn’t just dress women. He stages them. The set becomes a body. I think we all agree on his genius and understanding of fashion as art. On his sets the food becomes a metaphor. Pleasure, touch, appetite. It all gets served on the same oversized plate. By the time you realize what you’re looking at, you’re already in, with all your senses. That’s the brilliance.

Loewe’s Cult of Tomatoes and Scent Memory

Loewe doesn’t dabble. It commits. For Spring/Summer 2024, the brand introduced a tomato-shaped clutch that landed like a surrealist joke told with a straight face. Rendered in supple calfskin and finished with a wrist strap, the clutch wasn’t designed to charm. It was designed to confuse—and seduce.

Fashion press called it “weirdly desirable.” Jonathan Anderson, ever the provocateur, framed it within a broader campaign that collapsed the boundary between object and organism. Tomatoes weren’t decorative. They were part of the mise-en-scène. Juicy, grown in the sun. Resting in front of Loewe stores with a sense of ceremony usually reserved high end display.

That same visual language carries through Loewe’s candle collection. Released under the creative direction of Anderson and developed with in-house perfumer Nuria Cruelles, the line features vegetal scents that read more like ingredients than luxury notes. Tomato leaves. Thyme. Wasabi. Liquorice. Oregano. Each one bottled in weighty ceramic vessels or modeled on ancient amphorae.

The tomato leaves candle in particular has gained cult status. It smells of sun-warmed vines, crushed green stems, the moment just before ripeness. The fragrance isn’t sweet—it’s sharp. Green to the point of bitter. Earthy to the point of memory. It doesn’t smell like perfume. It smells like time spent in a garden you can’t quite name.

And that’s the strategy. Loewe isn’t creating ambience. It’s manufacturing emotional recall. Whether in leather goods or home scents, the appeal is tactile, vegetal, slightly uncanny. You don’t just look at it. You feel it before you understand why.

The tomato, in Loewe’s world, is more than a motif. It’s a method.

I’m Getting Nostalgic: Moschino’s Fast Food Mirage

In Milan, Autumn/Winter 2014 didn’t open with restraint. It opened with fries. Under Jeremy Scott’s new direction, Moschino sent out a collection that turned the golden arches into a fashion statement. The runway was a collision of red, yellow, and visual satire—sweater dresses shaped like Happy Meals, quilted bags that mimicked burger boxes, phone cases styled as cartons of fries.

It wasn’t parody. It was strategy. Scott tapped into the shared subconscious: childhood cravings, pop iconography, brand worship. The Moschino logo morphed into a warped M, echoing McDonald’s but claiming its own shape. Models walked like mascots in drag, turning fast food into fashion currency.

This wasn’t about nostalgia. It was about consumption. Mass culture reworked for luxury margins. A high-low provocation that didn’t just ask you to look. It asked you to want.

Appetite is Growing

Rhode, SKIMS, YSL, MIU MIU, Nike x Ben & Jerry’s, and many more are into the cross-over between food and fashion. And seems like we love it. I know I do, these are my two favorite things in the world. 

Fashion as Synesthesia

There’s a reason food works. It’s not decorative. It’s neurological. We associate food with safety, pleasure, intimacy. But in the right hands, it becomes dangerous. Erotic. Tactile. And completely unforgettable.

That’s what makes these campaigns so effective. They aren’t trends. They’re engineered desires. They leave an imprint. Not in the mind, but on the skin.

In a market where attention has the lifespan of a fruit fly, what stays with us are sensations. Fashion that smells like sex. Advertising that tastes like August. A dress that reminds you of hot cherries on a plate you never shared.

Don’t Look, Have a Bite

The new generation of fashion marketing doesn’t care whether you like the look. It wants to make you react. Sometimes that means making you slightly uncomfortable. Sometimes it means making you salivate.

Brands like Jacquemus & Loewe aren’t using food as a garnish. They’re using it as a weapon. To bypass the rational. To destabilise the scroll. To force a pause. And in that pause, something changes. You’re no longer a viewer. You’re a participant.

You want the bag. But maybe you also want the bite. Fashion brands are discovering that they hold power in stories beyond silk. They can seduce through scent, texture, sweetness, and the threat of spoilage.

It’s not “look at me.” It’s “feel me.” And in that sensory moment, the product becomes more than clothes, bags, or perfume. It becomes a craving.