Serving Taste: How Luxury Became Edible

Welcome to the restaurant:

The most fashionable item in your home is not hanging in your wardrobe; it is sitting in your kitchen cupboard. There are an average of twenty-five thousand monthly searches for the Kardashian–Jenner kitchens (Beesley, 2022), where opulent fruit displays and boutique-style pantries serve as status symbols. Dakota Johnson's iconic lime bowl has thirty-one million views (Architectural Digest, 2020); The influencer Nara Smith receives millions of likes for making Coca-Cola from scratch in couture (naraazizasmith, 2025); even influencer events now revolve around food: supper clubs and branded dining experiences like MOTH Drinks x Drink Amie (MOTH, 2024) are the new front row. The modern luxury unboxing is not a handbag, but an organic grocery haul, starring chlorophyll water, blue spirulina tonics, and hand-harvested sea salt. The language used to describe "It-girl" beauty products — glazing milks, raspberry jelly tints, cleansing butters — echoes in what we eat. Food has become fashion, and your kitchen the runway (Warren, 2025).

Food has also become an accessible aspiration, but as fresh produce grows more expensive and time more scarce, the simple act of eating well has become a luxury symbol of good taste and femininity. The kitchen has long been a site of gender tension and idealised femininity. Men are celebrated as chefs, while women's expectations of being in the kitchen reduce them to cooks, with only 6% of the world's top kitchens led by women (Restaurant, 2022). Therefore, it is unsurprising that food and its aesthetics are marketed disproportionately toward women. The rise of "tradwife" influencers reinforces an ideal of feminine aspiration grounded in consumption rather than production. These creators sell not food itself, but the fantasy of a pure-ease lifestyle (Jordan Theresa, 2025).  

Starter: Pineapplemania

Food is the basis for all the other parts of our lifestyle. Every day, you wake up and have to eat — a direct link to our biological nature. Throughout history, food has been a marker of wealth; from elaborate meals with exotic spices to "Pineapple Mania" to lavish banquets, food has become synonymous with class and taste (Marks, 2019). The focus has now shifted from abundance to purity: nourishing, curated meals and a well-stocked pantry with Gogi berries and durum wheat reflect your refined taste (Warren, 2025).

The idea of good taste has always been a marker of class. Pierre Bourdieu (1984) argues that when what is considered fashionable becomes accessible to the lower classes, it will not be long before it is deemed kitsch. Today, it is accessible to mass-consume; anyone can do a Shein haul, and thus taste now lies in curation rather than accumulation. It is about having the right oat milk, olive oil, and the right aesthetic arrangement, showcasing an illusion of effortlessness that only time, access, and knowledge can afford.

Main Course: Glazing Milk

As food transformed into a louder marker of status, it has seeped into our marketing; the beauty industry has borrowed its sensory vocabulary to sell us self-indulgence disguised as self-care (Chosen Vessel Studio, 2024). Our beauty routines now sound like dessert menus: cleansing butters, glazing milks, honey-infused lip balms, this is not incidental.

The beauty industry has positioned its products as edible pleasures; it knows they are non-essential but also frames them as a reward, borrowing terms from baked goods, desserts, and sweets. A strategy called necessity pairing: food, an inelastic good which is demanded regardless of price, is associated with the elastic good of beauty, the demand of which is sensitive to price. The product thrives by attaching itself to a need, blurring the line between want and necessity. Consumers subconsciously categorise these products as essential or see a chocolate soufflé body butter as a treat, similar to grabbing a coffee or dessert (Phia, 2025).

However, the industry rarely aligns with staple food items; they acknowledge they are non-essential but also frame themselves as a reward, borrowing terms from baked goods, desserts, and sweets. This links to the lipstick index (Bryan, 2022), which suggests that when the economy falters, sales of small luxuries tend to rise. It operates as a form of "micro-luxury": when consumers trade down from big-ticket items to more accessible indulgences, rather than a designer handbag, they get a designer lipstick. This is embedded in the culture's evolution of the Sweet Treat Economy and in the relationship between consumption and self-care (Tarbell, 2025). Beyond viral tweets and TikTok sounds,  reaching for a “sweet treat” after a hard day, feels like a necessary reward, while it may not be an organic foodshop, a designer doughnut feels less like a product and more like a treat. Unlike the Lipstick index, a sweet treat is not a physical luxury but an ephemeral pleasure, turning the act of "treating yourself" into constant consumption.

Dessert: Balenciaga x Erewhon Juice

High fashion has always known how to repackage luxury for mass desire. Chanel did it first, turning couture into a lipstick bullet — an object small enough to buy but still soaked in prestige (Chosen Vessel Studio, 2024). Now that logic has returned in edible form, food and fashion have always shared a table. In 1937, Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dali's dress turned dinner into couture (Rubenstein, 2020). The Dutch Golden Age immortalised fruit and bread as symbols of beauty and abundance. However, this has evolved into creating bite-sized portions of Michelin-level experiences. You may not have been invited to the Balenciaga fashion show, but you can buy their Erewhon smoothie collaboration (Tarbell, 2025). You probably will never sit in the front row of a Prada runway, but you can sip a coffee in their Harrods café (Chosen Vessel Studio, 2024).

This goes beyond the marketability of food but is an accessible moment in the reinvention of luxury itself, to experience. With the rise of mass consumption, experience has become a luxury not everyone can afford; it is not about excess but about taste, time, and the fleeting pleasure of the experience itself. What is more desirable than a Jacquemus carrot bag is an invitation to their vegan dinner party at the Palace of Versailles, or experiencing Laila Gohar's food installations, which blur the line between sculpture and supper (Warren, 2025).

In a world saturated with choice, the most exclusive thing of all is the immersive experience and absence of choice,  for example, the notable rise of molecular gastronomy in the kitchen (Manoj J and Venkatraman, 2025). The luxury of fine dining is the absence of choice, with a curated tasting menu where even your wine is preselected: it is a singular experience that cannot be replicated or mass-consumed.

The Bill: The price of taste 

While food has always been the marker of class, the desire to overindulge has become kitsch. In its place, the luxury of experience, and the desire to have no choice at all. 

Ingredients: Bibliography

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