By Flavia Prudente.
As said by the famous chef Silverio Covozzi for Interview Magazine, “Being able to cook a beautiful steak is really sexy” (2024: online).
my shooting: the recipe of an apple pie
Photography by: @wyattkraussphotographs
Styling and Creative Direction by: @flaviaprudenteeg
Styling Assistant: @brn.mcervieri
MUA: @artushauru
Model: @yamimasophia
Historically, food has been sexualized in many ways, but it is only recently that it has grown into a mainstream topic involving different media.
From the popularization of cooking shows to TikTok’s hot chef trends, sexualizing food (and the people who cook it) conquered all types of digital platforms and printed media. Equally, outside the screens, photography exhibits such as the Yeast International Photo festival and different museums have hosted events portraying the contemporary relationship with food.
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Source: Christiano Wennman for ID cover (Source ID, 2023, Instagram)
Even The Museum at FIT in NewYork hosted in 2023 the Food and Fashion Symposium, in which they featured important food and fashion scholars as well as designers and artists to discuss the overlap of food and fashion and their relationship with topics such as identity, body image, culture and society.
Scholars Elizabeth Way and Melissa Marra-Alvarez even conducted a specific research on Fashion and Food Studies, in which they said: ‘Food and Fashion are both inherently sensual objects. They interact with the body and engage the senses.’ (Melissa Marra-Alvarez and Elizabeth Way, 2022:27).
As in the world of the Press, Interview Magazine is not the only one covering this topic. In fact, in the past few years there has been an increase in fashion magazines that have decided to create a space to explore and highlight food. For example another one of the most praised magazines in recent days that discusses these matters is called Alla Carta.
This bi-annual publication that explores high-end fashion, art and design from an Italian point of view. To celebrate the Italian heritage of “conviviality”, the magazine decided to conduct all their interviews around a table. The Italian language, as a matter of fact, possesses two ways of using the word table. Il tavolo, in the masculine form, is used to define the physical object. Whereas in the feminine form, la tavola, is used to describe the embodiment of its total.
Meaning the table as a place to gather, eat, and most importantly,
enjoy “i piaceri della tavola'', the pleasures of the table.
Alla Carta explores a big range of contemporary topics, paired with breakfast, lunch and dinner interviews, with a consistent focus on the body and its sexuality. With the contemporary female point of view of the two co-founders Yara De Nicola, Editor in Chief, and Fabiana Fierotti, Fashion Director, Alla Carta focuses on the idea of talking about art and culture through the lens of food and fashion, intertwining these themes to show a deeper cultural comment on how society perceives and portrays the relationship between sustenance, sexuality and self-expression.
Sex, eating, and dressing are some of the basic needs of humankind.
Sexual appetite (pun intended) is an animal instinct.
But the research of physical pleasure and the exploration of the human body have a deep stance in the journey of self-actualization. In fact, the need to search for new sensations is one of the many reasons that sex is frequently associated with food, and why in art as in fashion, food has been used as a metaphor of the body.
Humans need to eat, copulate and get dressed, and in the contemporary fashion magazines the conjunction of these three needs evolve into an artistic dialogue; in order to explore how food and body are sexualized and represented in contemporary publications, such as it happens directly in fashion magazines.
The blend of food, fashion, and sexuality in today’s media taps into our core desires and identities.
Publications like "Alla Carta" and "Interview Magazine" create a vivid cultural snapshot, showing how we view and express the sensual side of life.
By bringing together the pleasures of eating, dressing, and intimacy, these magazines spark important conversations about body image, identity, and the quest for pleasure.
As these themes keep evolving in both digital and print, they encourage us to think about how our basic needs connect to our expressions of who we are as individuals and as a society.
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