Centuries later, the theater persists. In 1937, Elsa Schiaparelli stitched a lobster onto a white silk evening gown and Wallis Simpson wore it, the lobster was borrowed from Dalí, which is to say, it was already half digested by the art world, women photographed in it did not order seafood afterward, they ordered the dress, the boundary between what adorns the body and what enters it had been tailored out of existence.
Consider the Victorian mourning banquet, black iced cakes, raven shaped jellies, cutlery draped in crêpe, grief was plated, one mourned in slow courses, corseted, while the aspic trembled like a held breath, to be tasteful meant to taste nothing, or to taste only what matched the wallpaper. The table was a mirror. The mirror was not fed.
In 1960s Milan, Paco Rabanne welded dresses from metal discs and called it progress, the same decade, confectioners began airbrushing cakes with automotive lacquer so they could be photographed for magazines that would never be eaten, both objects were designed to reflect light, not to be touched, the model and the dessert shared a directive, hold the pose until the flash is done, shelf life replaced life.
The pattern repeats because the hunger is identical, a 2022 Paris runway sent models out carrying baguettes as clutches, the audience applauded, no one buttered them, the bread was not for hunger, it was for semiotics, meanwhile, in Tokyo, a pastry chef layers 24 karat gold on a strawberry and sells it for the price of a winter coat, the coat keeps you warm, the strawberry keeps the myth of excess alive for 90 seconds on video.
History keeps a ledger. Rome had garum poured over everything until the palette of an empire tasted of fermented fish, Rome also had purple reserved for emperors, extracted from thousands of sea snails, one was waste, one was power, both stained, today the stains are digital, a chef plates foam on a stone and calls it landscape, a designer tapes a banana to a gallery wall and calls it value, the audience consumes the image, not the object. The object was merely the invitation.
The oldest kitchens and the oldest ateliers share a room, pigment once came from crushed beetles and ochre, same as dye for tunics and sauce for quail, salt preserved cod and salt preserved frescoes. Beauty and flavor were taxonomies of the same preservative instinct, make the mortal last a little longer, look a little less afraid.
So the modern table arrives, a plate glazed like a vase, a jacket printed with pomegranates that will never drip, a shoe shaped like a croissant that cannot be bitten, we have engineered a world where the aesthetic of nourishment is more profitable than nourishment and the flavor of design outcompetes any recipe. The museum and the menu print on the same cardstock.
They said never play with food, they never stopped playing with it, they framed it, hung it, marched it down a runway, and sold it by the square inch, the mouth was optional, the eye was the client.
We are all still at that banquet, the peacock is synthetic, the gold is edible, the dress is lobster, someone will post it before the ice melts, someone else will caption it, delicious.
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