Food for thought - Why fashion turned to food in 2025.

This year, across the industry, fashion and luxury didn’t just touch food, it curated, staged, edited, and authored it. Last month’s opening of Langosteria Montenapoleone, crowning the top three floors of the new Palazzo Fendi, Langosteria’s new outpost is not just a restaurant, it’s a three-storey immersion in the Fendi universe, a dining world constructed directly inside the architecture of the maison.

2025 is the year fashion folded food into its cultural practice. Not as novelty, and not as marketing, but as strategy, identity, and atmosphere. Gucci continued to expand the Gucci Osteria constellation with Massimo Bottura. Louis Vuitton deepened its hospitality ambitions with LV Restaurants & LV Cafés across Seoul, Tokyo and Chengdu. Dior extended its “art de vivre” with Monsieur Dior in Paris and a growing network of Dior Cafés globally. Saint Laurent’s Sushi Park experience in the Paris store. Below the maison level, the cultural avant-garde accelerated the shift, with WE ARE ONA turned dining into itinerant art.

So what draws fashion back to the table? It comes down to sensation and the deeper layers of memory. Brands rediscovered that people remember how you made them feel. Nothing creates emotional memory more reliably than taste, scent, warmth, the feeling of being hosted. Food is both the most universal pleasure and the most basic human need. It collapses distance. It creates intimacy. It grounds you.

Feasting has always been a stage on which cultures rehearse their ideas of status, pleasure, and belonging. Cinema has long understood that. From Fellini’s grotesque banquets, to Visconti’s ballroom suppers, it uses food to speak about class, desire, and the body’s place in modern life. The 17th-century Dutch masters staged abundance as a symbolic language, de Heem’s heaped banquet tables, Heda’s gleaming lobsters, still lifes where pleasure sits beside vanitas. That is the lineage fashion is drawing from now. When a maison opens a restaurant, it’s reactivating a deep visual and emotional archive in which taste, texture, and ritual become ways of expressing status, belonging. The desire to be close to something, or someone, that feels alive.

Food offers immediacy, presence, sensation. Luxury brand cafés democratise the logo, but they rareify access, turning exclusivity into a matter of invitation, location, timing. The cultural circuit around food, from We Are Ona’s culinary installations to the maison-led restaurants, is creating a new form of cultural capital that sits between hospitality, performance, and ritual. Fashion moved into food because food is the medium that resists abstraction.

And here’s some food for thought; when the news broke yesterday that Dario Vitale had been given the Italian boot by Prada Group, my thoughts drifted to Peter Dundas’ PUCCI, whose sharp, sensual discipline felt far closer to what the Versace customers hunger for today.