Considering ‘Condiment Couture’

The ongoing foodie fashion trend, in which luxury and other fashion designers integrate fast food, snack, and any number of food-related brands into capsule collections of apparel, accessories, and footwear, shows no signs of waning. One subset of this trend recently benefited from a spike in interest: namely, “condiment couture.” This mini-trend has typically taken the form of unlicensed pieces, such as a Judith Lieber pillbox purse or a Rachel Antonoff sweater, both sporting graphics of unbranded bottles of hot sauce. 

The trend saw a boost to its profile last month with the announcement of Kate Spade’s collaboration with Heinz, which attracted lots of attention from traditional and social media. This global partnership featured the color red, along with Heinz ketchup logos, on summer totes, pouches, small leather goods, t-shirts, footwear, keychains, phone cases, and other products. One piece was a 3D ketchup bag that replicated, in a much larger size, the white plastic ketchup packets available in fast food restaurants. Individual items were priced from $45 to $398. 

This initiative joined a handful of other officially branded collaborations in this vein:  

• Jeff Hamilton paired with KFC in May for a collection designed around the five sauces the fast-food chain offers with its Saucy Nuggets, namely Honey Sriracha, Korean BBQ, Sticky Chicky, Georgia Gold, and Nashville Honey Hot. The graphics on the leather jackets and bucket hats featured lots of imagery of dripping sauce. NBA player Tyrese Halliburton and NTWRK, a channel featuring pop culture-centric shoppable shows, are the other partners in the collaboration. 

• Lisa Says Gah, a retailer specializing in ethically sourced and long-lasting fashion, mostly from female designers, capitalized on the Italian-inspired “tomato girl summer” TikTok trend of 2023 with a limited-edition collaboration with ketchup and tomato sauce brand Hunt’s. Rife with red hues and tomato-related design elements, the capsule, which included Lisa Says Gah’s Alex t-shirt, a tote bag, and dangle earrings, focused mostly on canned tomatoes. 

• Streetwear brand Primitive Skateboarding highlighted Kikkoman soy sauce in 2019 in a collection of long- and short-sleeved t-shirts, a jacket, a sweatshirt, socks, and sandals, as well as a chopstick set and a skateboard deck in the shape of a soy sauce bottle. The designs featured the brand’s name, logos, and colors; Japanese and English lettering; images of restaurant-style soy sauce bottles; and the like. The partnership kicked off an initiative called Primitive Tastes that included a series of culinary-focused capsules, among other components. 

While the trend has been gaining a bit of steam recently, condiment brands have been occasionally featured in foodie fashion collaborations for a decade or more. In 2014, hot sauce brand Tapatío paired with The Hundreds on a Cinco de Mayo capsule of two items, a t-shirt and a 10-ounce bottle of hot sauce, both featuring a bespoke illustration of The Hundreds founding designers, known as Ben and Bobby Hundreds, with Tapatío’s mascot Emelio.  

There have also been many branded condiment-centric apparel collections marketed by the food brands themselves, typically on the ecommerce sites where their rotating collections of novelty merchandise can be found. In 2022, Tabasco launched what it billed as its first-ever capsule collection in the fashion space, a nine-piece assortment of apparel including bucket hats, Hawaiian style shirts, slides, and the like, all with an outdoor barbecue theme.