For hundreds of years consumers and scholars have acknowledged that food
is affected by the same rapid shifts in taste and consumption as
clothing. Trends in fashion and in food are increasingly being marketed
in tandem and sold as fashionable commodities to reinforce capitalist
power. Yet despite this, the reciprocal relationship between fashion and
food has not been fully explored - until now.
Gastrofashion from Haute Cuisine to Haute Couture examines the
relationship between food and fashion in clothing, style, and dress in
all its manifestations, from the restaurant to the catwalk, to
cookbooks, diet fads, slow food, fast fashion, celebrity chefs, artists,
and musical performers. It traces the relationship between food and
fashion back to the Middle Ages, to the rise of social refinements in
manners, speech, clothing, and taste, when behaviours and appearances
reflected social status and propriety and where the social display of
wealth and privilege were inseparable from food and clothing. Nowadays,
designer eateries such as Pasticceria Prada and Armani Ristorante and
the display of food on fashion catwalks are the precursors of the
restaurants of pre-Revolutionary France and the spectacles of world
fairs and exhibitions.
This much-needed book offers a substantive and incisive discussion for
all those interested in the complex interrelationship between food and
fashion - scholars, students, and general readers alike.
