You might never see a Chanel show in the flesh, but take heart – there’s one thing you and Karl Lagerfeld have in common. Supermarkets. But while us lesser mortals head to Sainsbury’s, Karl has a classier approach to the corner-shop dash. This season, he transformed the Grand Palais into a jumbo fashion supermarché, complete with Chanel-branded teas (“Little Black Tea”) and boxes of toast stamped with the interlocking CC logo.
Lagerfeld isn’t the only one taking inspiration from downmarket goods: On the runway, Jeremy Scottsent down Moschino models dressed like McDonald's employees, complete with Golden Arches-branded handbags on plastic food trays. Charlotte Olympia and Kate Spadeboth produced handbags that looked more like Chinese takeaway boxes than £500 purses, and Anya Hindmarch’s crisp- packet purse has already sold out everywhere. All of a sudden, couture is obsessed with food – and not just regular food, but cheap, trashy fast food.
Some aren’t too impressed: Moschino have attracted the wrath of some McDonalds employees, who allege that the brand has ‘glamourised their struggle’. But by and large, people love fashion’s new taste for junk food – Moschino’s french fries phone cover sold out the instant it went online. It’s a far cry from the uproar last year over Jil Sander flogging £185 sandwich bags.
The real difference between couture’s take on fast food and its real-life incarnation, of course, is luxury. For her crisp-packet clutch, Anya Hindmarch 3D scanned the ‘perfect crisp packet’ with 100 tripod-mounted cameras to take 360-degree photographs. From there, the scanned models were cast and sent to an accessories maker in Florence. The result? A £995 Crisp Packet gold-tone clutch that’s already sold out on Net-a-Porter.
‘It was a real labour of love,’ she explains to The Debrief. ‘It is a perfect little clutch and actually a little piece of art. It is really modern, and a sort of forever classic, I think.’ As for what’s driving this craze for everything calorific? Hindmarch describes it as an extension of her ‘sense of humour’ and her ‘love of transforming an everyday product.’
Legendary fashion stylist Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, who styled the Moschino show, is of the same thinking. In her totally hysterical online show, J’Adore, she exclaimed of the McDonalds themed show: ‘This is what fashion is – it’s quick, it’s fun and it’s done!’
What with the dramatic upheavals and exits in fashion (see: Marc Jacobs quitting Louis Vuitton), fun has been something that’s sorely lacking. And what’s more fun than a fizzy, sugar-laden, calorific take on the food of your childhood? Show me an adult who doesn’t smile at the memory of Happy Meal toys and whizzing round the supermarket in a trolley and I’ll show you a human being deprived of a childhood of everything that’s good in the world.
Fast food is a speedy sugar high, mixing feel-good nostalgia with trashy cheerfulness. It’s like the experience of fashion itself: we’ve all had that instant hit of pleasure when we buy something we know we shouldn’t but can’t resist anyway. Put it another way – there’s a reason quinoa and brown rice haven’t inspired a fashion collection.
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Pictures: Jason Lloyd-Evans
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.