Where Fashion Meets Food
Notes from studying fashion while not buying any clothes.
The words that I know from French without ever having tried to learn them all have to do with food or fashion: Maison. Mise en place. Haute couture. Pâte brisée. Oh-so-cliché to align these two beautiful human impulses, to cook and to clothe ourselves, with France. But it’s mostly to France that I’ve been going through documentaries about designers to understand what has gone so wrong with fashion—how did the appetite for clothing become so massive that it pollutes the earth it seeks to adorn? Has the notion of “luxury” become so entwined with excessive spending that we cannot rein it in to simply mean “something made well”? Why do we think we deserve to consume so much crap? How do we justify this? And what can we learn from how entwined in land, waste, and human and animal exploitation both food and fashion—two feminized arenas—are?
These are big questions that can’t be answered in one essay, but they’re the questions that have been driving my research and living, and they will continue to do so.
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I decided to spend 2024 not buying any clothing, and I’d spent the few years prior focusing on acquiring only from small, sustainable brands using natural materials and vintage (chiefly through Puerto Rico’s Hola Aida and my own mother’s thrifting habit). I was not perfect at this, to which my many basics from COS can attest, and I wanted to do a no-buy year precisely because I bought too many clothes around the release of my first book, rationalized by public appearances.
My decision hasn’t been difficult to abide by, and I believe that this is because I’ve had so much practice over the years being considerate of my food choices—once as a vegan, more recently as a vegetarian—that it became second nature to second-guess what broader cultural forces seem to be asking of me: The pressure to eat meat to fit in, to be easy, to go with the flow feels very similar to the pressure of trends; they have, to me, a similar cultural role and texture.
The values that drive my choices in both are solid and deeply rooted in who I am, my aesthetic preferences, research, and life experience. I have the tools, as a nearly 39-year-old, to step back from trends and ask whether something works for my life. I know what jeans look good on me, what kind of oversize button-down shirts I like, and how I want a T-shirt to fall. I know what pantry items I need, which farmer grows the best arugula, and how to turn basic staples into a feast. You probably know your own equivalents, too—your non-negotiables, your go-tos.
When, during this no-buy year, I thought I’d like to have a black midi A-line skirt, I cut up a dress I wasn’t wearing anymore and created one. I think because I came of age in the late ’90s and early ’00s, too, I don’t mind cutting shit up and I don’t mind imperfections like a tiny bleach stain or rip. Because I spent a lot of time reading my mom’s copies of Vogue as a kid, I internalized the language, which helps me know what I want when I want a certain look: midi A-line skirt.
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As in writing and as in the kitchen, I like to come to dressing with confidence.
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In lieu of buying clothes, I started to watch the aforementioned documentaries, one after the other, always searching for more. I started to read books like Dana Thomas’s Fashionopolis: Why What We Wear Matters and Teri Agin’s The End of Fashion: How Marketing Changed the Clothing Business Forever, and to get reacquainted with Naomi Klein’s 1999 No Logo. It’s become important to me to understand fashion and clothing on the same level that I understand the global food system, and in continuing to read and watch films about both, the similarities kept cropping up.
“Poor communities will be forced to produce luxury products for export to rich countries and classes,” wrote Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies in their 1996 “Leipzig Appeal for Women’s Food Security.” “More and more land in the South is not used for nourishing local people, but for the production of luxury items for export.”
I knew that, just like with food and the bad behavior of corporations, from Shein to Loro Piana, it wouldn’t matter how people were treated to make the clothes just as concerns about labor in meat processing have not caused shifts in behavior. It had been a fallacy, that spending more ensured equity at least at some of the points in the trade. That elusive equity was why people might pay more for coffee or fair-trade bananas—but, like a Wagyu steak, it was never why anyone was buying $9,000 sweaters, which is certainly where a crucial difference emerges. The crucial difference is the notion of luxury.
Fancy beef isn’t fancy because the cows are treated so well; it’s because of some specific marbling of fat and the settings in which it’s served. Fancy sweaters aren’t fancy because the workers are treated well, but because they signify wealth and knowledge of what signifies wealth. Expressing taste through an understanding of what is well-made and thoughtful is out, if it were ever in; expressing vast amounts of wealth is definitively, loudly in—it’s all that matters. What people who don’t have thousands to drop at The Row are doing when they go to T.J. Maxx for a Margaux dupe for fall is play-acting. Do they even ask themselves whether they would want a Margaux in the first place?
“So long as we identify with aspirational consumption as [a] way to signal wealth,” writes Oyster Kim in “everything is advertisement,” “we’re doomed to this Time Square-esque entrapment.”
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Something about me is hopeful that what’s really eternal is a taste rooted in giving a shit about craftsmanship and care, sure—also beauty. I’d always rather spend a few hundred on a well-made bag from a small brand not just because I don’t have thousands but because I don’t really care for labels. I care for design.
What I’ve remembered and fallen in love with again by studying fashion designers is that design is so separate from consumerism—indeed, that they’re antithetical, and the only people who don’t think that are the billionaires and editors and influencers who profit off creating an endless anxiety that everyone needs the new, the next, and by ignoring the truth: fashion is an art usually best practiced by a teenager with big ideas and no money.
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Agins, in The End of Fashion, begins by chronicling Isaac Mizrahi’s meteoric rise and fall in the 1990s, when his shows were well-reviewed but no one was buying: “He was an artiste who refused to become another Seventh Avenue garmento.”
The late André Leon Talley, in The Gospel According to André, kicks off the film by saying: “I don’t live for fashion. I live for beauty and style. Fashion is fleeting.”
The perfumer Francis Kurkdjian tells Rachel Syme in The New Yorker: “I memorized the name and location of every couturier on the street—Ungaro, Nina Ricci, Jean-Louis Scherrer, Christian Dior. You have to understand that I was not into fashion, like things you could buy. I was into couturiers.”
Amy Odell writes, at Back Row: “I often find it challenging to write about these shows because we’re looking at clothes that almost no one buys and that might not even ever get made for people to buy. Many runway shows are understood to be in service of accessories sales. And Prada is one such accessories brand — influencers wear the clothes to events while it seems like a safe bet that most customers tend to just buy the bags and/or the shoes. And by that measure, this show was a win, in terms of making people want to buy.”
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I’m tempted, lately, by jewelry. I feel like I should be more adorned in silver and gold than I am. I want it to be chunky, layered. Leopard, apparently, is trending, but I’ve had my leopard days, and I’d rather pull out a favorite vintage skirt when it suits me, not the moment. The exceptions to my preference for craft over labels: The only way I will take care of a pair of sunglasses is if they’re emblazoned with a designer name. Same for my eyeglasses. This is luxury sorcery. I also adore Marc Jacobs and will wear his name loudly—he defined “cool” at a pivotal time in my life. I still carry the gigantic nylon Marc by Marc Jacobs tote I bought in 2008 with money from my first “real” job. His shoes were the ones I wore on my first book tour and now for almost every public appearance where I need confidence (and to ensure people aren’t hurting their backs to speak to me, considering I’m five feet tall).
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Industrial meat production, fast fashion, the gig economy, AI—we are told these are what make the good life, an easy life, a smooth life possible. They are justified through social justice talking points about access, yet for the most part these are exploiting the poorest people of the world and the planet itself while allowing the in-crisis middle class of affluent nations to fall more into some numb, mindless state of entrapment where there’s so much meat; so much clothing; servant stand-ins to deliver dinner and groceries; and robots that use people’s original writing and seemingly endless amounts of water and energy to do their work—and they can spend their free time scrolling and shopping. There is, apparently, no moral limit to the justification of participating in exploitation.
As sustainable fashion writer Aja Barber has said, it’s not poor people who keep Zara in business, and that goes the same for industrial animal agriculture. As with meat consumption (if we’re not discussing animal rights), clothing is about volume: How much do you need to be satisfied, and how much should others give for you to reach satiation?
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When I decide to buy clothes again, I know exactly what I will be spending money on: a Chava Studio oversize shirt in pink twill with a monogram and the Sally Torres Vega Greta pant. I’ll thrift an oversize black blazer. That’s it.
Next Monday, I’ll be sending out a paywalled “fashion bibliography” with a further list of documentaries, books, articles, podcasts, and newsletters that I have been watching, reading, and keeping up with regarding issues in sustainability, clothing, and luxury.
In today’s weekly Salon for paid subscribers, we’ll discuss what we love and hate about clothes and their role in our lives. I’d also offer Cameron Steele’s recent gorgeous piece “Ode to a green dress” as a discussion basis.
This Friday, I put out The Monthly Menu for paid subscribers, a chronicle of where I’ve been eating, what I’ve been cooking, and recipe and cookbook notes and recommendations.
On Friday, October 25, we will have the second part of the Desk Book Club discussion of Dan Saladino’s Eating to Extinction. We are reading this one in three parts because it’s long, but quite relevant to conversations on writing the weather. For the second session, we’ll read through page 256. Pick it up from Archestratus, the 2024 Desk Book Club partner.
News
Come join me for the Newsletter Workshop. There is one more session on November 12. If you’d like to gift someone who’s interested in starting a newsletter a workshop, gift cards are available. Paid subscribers, the discount code is in the header to this email, or just reply to email me for it.
My book No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating is now out in paperback.
I was already tearing up reading this wonderful essay, and then was totally honored to see you mention mine at the end as a reading rec, thank you! This was so powerful to read.
There is so much to chew on here and I really liked the pacing, the way the essay was segmented worked so well