The biggest trend of the season is …… food?

The biggest trend of the season is …… food? Anna Bouclaville.

Helmed by Chef Alice Waters, Bay Area earthy food mecca Chez Panisse has long served up minimalist desserts in its casual upstairs café: ripe fruit in a bowl.

To select the right fig, pear or olallieberries for each bowl, Chez Panisse’s kitchen staff carefully tracks the ripeness, sorting, sniffing and excitement of each one throughout the day. The dish is meant to celebrate not only the bounty the restaurant receives daily from local farmers, but also its innate potential. It reveres the ur-fruit of Eden and invites diners to worship at the table as well. For Carolina Herrera’s Resort 2023 collection, designer Wes Gordon was equally committed to the essentialist fruit prints that adorn many of his pieces. The flowing strapless dresses were demure but showed off collarbones and playful high openings, and the oversized red cherries the size of a toddler’s fist looked so ripe they seemed to bleed into the creamy background. It’s the kind of dress you might wear on a primetime stroll through the orchard, if you trust yourself not to let the juice of your freshly bitten fruit stain your clothes.

Carolina Herrera Resort Cherry Pattern 2023. courtesy of the designer.

This is the first food print Gordon remembers on the label. “I think the key to conversation prints is that everything we do has to be beautiful and joyful first and foremost, so that irreverence never takes the place of beauty and what you want to wear,” he says. “In this case, Cherry combines the two perfectly.”

The more sophisticated dishes that have recently infiltrated the fashion world’s parties and installations in the form of rococo seafood towers and avant-garde cakes are finally making their way onto the runway. For the fall and vacation seasons, some dresses were covered or embellished with food: sequined yellow Bottega Veneta halter dresses were adorned with lemon stem silhouettes sparkling with sequined dewdrops; Gucci dresses were adorned with playful but delicate ice cream prints; Collina Strada party dresses featured starburst kiwi prints. Moschino also featured cherry prints in a 70s pop-art mix, combining lemon green and orange.

Bottega Veneta’s lemon pattern for fall 2022. Courtesy of the designer.

If the first Pop Art glorified the supermarket soup cans and hamburgers of post-war America, this new culinary-tailoring trend insists on luxury. It’s a simple visual language that conveys sweetness, affluence and the one thing everyone desires – a vacation. Last fall, art director and designer Todd Heim launched a line of home furnishings called Chez Diane, which included blue and white checkered bibs with a lobster print, named after his pseudonym Steak Diane. This year, Rachel Antonoff released a blue plaid dress with an entire tower of seafood on it. These are not foods you make a fuss about-they are foods you love.

A seafood tower gets attention simply because it takes up the entire view of the diner. You could just order a plate of oysters, but why not turn them into a sculpture? It’s “something you would order for a special occasion,” explains Antonov, who has also been working on the pink and orange shrimp motif since 2019. “It’s celebration food, [not] subsistence food.”

Collina Strada Spring 2023 broccoli bag. aurora rose/Shutterstock

These treats promise luxury that isn’t always purely financial, either. “Fruit is associated with the idea of luxury and rest in a way that other foods are not,” explains Khushbu Shah, editor of Food & Wine Restaurants. “Time is something that people often forget and is one of the most luxurious forms of luxury. There’s a plate of fruit prepared for you that you can sit and eat while you lie down.”

The patterns also represent an increased sense of personal identification with food. “Your food preferences are a form of self-expression,” Shah says. Antonoff also notes that many of her customers are driven by emotional responses to her work: “We get a lot of emails that are like, ‘Oh my God, my friend needs this.'” I think people have a sense of belonging to their hobby and their hobby.” Next spring, she plans to launch a Key lime pie sweater; the Aperol Spritz dress will debut in the summer.

At the Gucci fashion show, food motifs became more casual. One was an ice cream social in a dress: breezy, almost bohemian shapes embellished with the colorful silhouette of an ice cream cone. As sophisticated as the skirt was, it reminded you that eating an ice cream cone in the heat is a risk: eat me before I ruin your shirt. It first threatens a napkin, then a hand, and runs down your wrist as you speed up your consumption with a view to victory.

Food prints on clothes contain a paradox: they suggest chaos while exuding the opposite of chaos. What if a woman ate a sweet cherry in her cherry print dress? “I tell women when they buy a Herrera wedding dress not to look at it as too expensive,” Gordon says. “Live in it fully. If that means spilling on it or soiling it, then let the dress die an honorable death.”

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