„Everyone wants to get into fashion, but fashion wants to get into food.“

An essay by Stephan Huber

This quote, half ironic, half prophetic, captures a mood that has been quietly growing inside the fashion world. At a time when digital acceleration, mass consumption, and algorithmic sameness have stripped fashion of much of its mystery and meaning, something essential seems to be missing. That something is what food – and more broadly, hospitality – still holds: A deep connection to life, to feeling, to presence.

Fashion used to be a mirror of culture. Today, it often feels like a mirror of marketing. What was once driven by desire is now driven by drop schedules. But if we look beyond the surface, we find a hunger – not just in designers, but in consumers, retailers, and even media – for a more intimate, sensual, and soulful kind of experience. Fashion, in this light, doesn’t just look at food as another lifestyle add-on. It looks at it like a language it has forgotten how to speak.

Food is essential to life. No one argues about this. It nourishes, it connects, it comforts. It is, quite literally, what we are made of. But what we wear – what touches our skin, what we wrap around our bodies each day – is no less intimate. And yet, we rarely speak of fashion in such vital terms.

Touched by Tactility

Fashion still has the potential to be a deeply sensorial experience. The feel of wool against skin. The ritual of getting dressed. The way color influences mood. But these sensualities have been muted by a system optimized for speed, scale, and clicks. Physical retail, once the site of the fashion theater, has struggled to hold ground – though some places, like Le Bon Marché in Paris, still manage to orchestrate atmosphere, curiosity, and storytelling in a way that engages the senses, not just the wallet.

Clothing, like food, has always been about more than function. It tells stories – about where we come from, who we are, who we long to become. It carries memory. It carries identity. In many cultures, garments mark life’s most significant moments: birth, mourning, celebration, transformation. Just like food, clothing can be deeply emotional. The scarf that smells like your mother. The sweater you wore to your first job. The dress you associate with a specific city or season or love.

And yet, fashion has spent decades detaching itself from that kind of meaning. In its race to keep up with demand, fashion’s language became impersonal: drops, clicks, checkouts. Quantity over connection. Meanwhile, food embraced the opposite arc. It reclaimed its roots. It honored regionality. It turned grandmothers into experts and ingredients into protagonists. The rise of farm-to-table wasn’t just about freshness – it was about storytelling. Perhaps that’s why we grant chefs a certain authorship that fashion once held – because they never fully abandoned the emotional weight of their medium.

We accept that chefs have a philosophy. That a dish reflects not just taste, but a context: place, heritage, obsession, even grief. We know where our sourdough comes from, who made the miso, why the pasta at that one trattoria in Milan tastes like nowhere else. We respect signature. We understand intention.

Fashion must learn from food – not to sell more, but to make people feel more. Because feeling isn’t just sentiment. It’s the gateway to meaning, connection, and memory.

This isn’t to say that fashion lacks vision today. Quite the opposite. But the structures rarely allow for it to breathe. What chefs seem to have protected – or reclaimed – is the right to move at their own rhythm, to speak their own language, to say no to scale when it threatens integrity.

So when I say hospitality is the new luxury, I mean precisely this cultural and emotional shift from material possessions to experiences and personalized service. This shift is not about abandoning beauty, or fantasy, or even hedonism. It’s about giving them weight. Relevance. Connection.

Beyond Borders

When fashion reaches beyond its borders, something remarkable happens: it stops being just an industry – and starts becoming a cultural force again. And an essential part of emerging models for a new kind of urban culture: small-scale, multi-sensory, high-empathy. Places that resist industrial noise and instead invite presence, participation, and emotional investment.

The implications go beyond aesthetics. In a time when city centers are struggling to hold onto meaning – when traditional retail is shrinking, and community is increasingly digital – fashion’s collaboration with other sensorial, story-rich disciplines could be an answer. Not just to bring people back into spaces, but to make those spaces feel alive again.
Because now is exactly the right time. There is a growing, almost visceral longing for realness, for clarity, for connection. And fashion – especially fashion retail when reimagined with intention – has the tools to respond. It can offer presence. It can offer warmth. It can offer spaces that invite emotion, participation, and a sense of belonging. And that’s not only hopeful – it’s actionable.

Commerce Meets Culture

This interdisciplinarity can also unlock new economic ways of thinking. Where traditional retail alone may no longer sustain a space, a thoughtful blend of commerce and culture just might. A boutique that also serves food, hosts readings, commissions artists. A fashion studio that shares its kitchen with a ceramics collective. A concept store that becomes a stage, a café, a conversation.

These are not utopian visions – they’re already happening.
They’re driven by creative entrepreneurs who understand that experience is the new currency, and that relevance comes from resonance. From the LX Factory in Lisbon to Simon Miller’s new boutique in the heart of LA’s Arts District. From the Pop-Up Aquarium, the beautifully curated space Clemens Sagmeister opened on Lake Constance, to countless other local hybrids quietly redefining what a retail space can be.

The lesson? Creative convergence isn’t a threat to fashion’s identity. It may be the very thing that saves it. Not by making fashion bigger – but by making it deeper. More rooted in time, place, and person. More integrated into the urban imagination.

The future of fashion may well look more like a chef’s kitchen than a showroom – authored, rooted, local in scale but universal in resonance. Less about chasing newness, more about crafting meaning.

Because in the end, the strongest design – in food or fashion – isn’t trend-driven.
It’s memory-driven.

Fashion is looking for relevance. And perhaps, instinctively, it knows where to find it: in food, in hospitality, in the shared rituals that make us feel alive and connected. Not because food is trending, but because it is true. Rooted. Immediate. Story-rich. Sensual. Everything fashion once was – and could be again.

This is not about turning fashion into food, nor romanticizing the dinner table. It’s about recognizing that both fields – when they are at their best – rely on the same fundamentals: intention, authorship, and emotion. The power to create meaning, not just material. The ability to shape identity through presence, not just product.

By reaching across disciplines, fashion can become less isolated and more integrated – part of a wider cultural metabolism that includes architects, chefs, farmers, perfumers, artists. The future isn’t monolithic. It’s multi-sensory, polyphonic, and deeply local. Built not from the top down, but from the inside out.

In this world, fashion isn’t the main course – it’s a seat at the table. And that, finally, may be the most exciting place to be.