CULTURE HAS AN APPETITE, EVERY BRAND WANTS TO FEED YOU
Food used to belong to food brands. Not anymore. Fashion houses are running smoothie bars, beauty brands are opening ice cream pop-ups, and sportswear labels are setting up produce stalls.
Food has become the shared language every category reaches for when it wants to feel human, and the breadth of who's speaking it now is the real story.
FOOD SHOWS UP EVERYWHERE NOW
The list of fashion-and-food crossovers has stopped being a novelty and started being a category. Balenciaga's Boost pop-up served three signature smoothies, Main Character, Momentum, and Back to Life, alongside pressed juices and protein bars, timed to Paris Men's Fashion Week.
Loewe Perfumes took the reverse route, turning a scent (its new pistachio candle) into an exclusive ice cream flavour at a real London ice cream bar.
Add Kith's coffee counters, Puma and Saint Laurent's café takeovers, Prada's bar activations, and KFC's wine pairing, and food has quietly become the connective tissue running through fashion, sport, beauty, and lifestyle marketing at once.
Image Credit: ©KFC, used for review purposes
WHY IT WORKS: ACCESSIBILITY WITHOUT THE PRICE TAG
For premium and luxury brands specifically, food solves a problem no amount of advertising can: most people will never buy the hero product, but almost everyone will buy a €12 smoothie or a scoop of ice cream.
One trade analysis of the Balenciaga activation put it plainly, the format "allows Balenciaga to open up to a broader audience" who get "a piece of the brand's universe" without the price of admission. Food is participatory, sensory, and inherently social in a way a product display case never will be.
That's the whole trade.
Image Credit: ©PUMA, used for review purposes
EVEN THE MUNDANE IS GETTING CULTURALLY CHARGED
What's notable now isn't that fashion and food overlap, that's old news, it's that even the most unglamorous food behaviours are becoming brand territory.
The Ordinary sold cartons of eggs at everyday prices at its New York pop-up and 2-kilogram bags of rice at "ordinary prices" in Tokyo, deliberately leaning into a moment of grocery scarcity rather than around it.
Grocery store tourism, produce stalls, condiments, pickles: the least glamorous aisle in the shop is now a place brands want to be seen.
Image Credit: ©The Ordinary, used for review purposes
SO WHAT?
Don't file food under "collaboration category" and move on. Ask what taste, serve, or hospitality format could make the brand feel tangible rather than aspirational. Food is the cheapest, fastest way into a brand world, especially when the actual product is expensive, rare, or hard to experience day to day.
Everyone's hungry. The brands winning right now are the ones who worked that out first.
Published 15 October 2026 · Ella Palmer, LOVE
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