CROSSOVER: The Unlikely Fusion of Fast Food & High Fashion

mcd

Sometimes the lines in design are blurred. Fashion collections, inspired by the past, present as well as future, often feature a “Crossover” in design where one industry riffs off the other, emulating classic lines and form. Here we pick two standouts from differing industries to show that overlap.

The Independent writes: “Fast food and fashion should have nothing in common. They are diametric opposites, ideological adversaries. Fast food is egalitarian, en masse – let them eat Big Macs! It’s cheap and cheerful, makes you fat, greasy and garish, and is available on every corner.

Fashion, by contrast, is elitist. It relies on superlative craftsmanship and fine materials, on the expense those ingredients entail. More than anything else, fashion is exclusive – only available to a few; excluding others.

That’s the theory, at least. However, chart the rise of ‘fast fashion’, the Burger King to high fashion’s Cordon Bleu. Fast fashion, generally, is a term applied to high-street clothing. The term relates not only to the speed of production – meaning that stores such as Topshop and Zara have not the traditional biannual drops of fresh clothing, but new stock flooding in every week – but of consumption. Cheaply constructed and hence not made to last, fast fashion clothes have a shorter and shorter use-by date coupled with ever-diminishing prices. They’re disposable.”

How closely do food and fashion run parallel? As consumers clamor for convenience, we see more crossovers in all industries, leading us to question whether the intersections are due to our insatiable need for stuff on the cheap.

Image: Hans

Amy DuFault

by

April 22, 2015