is vogue missing out by not having @voguefood
the case for @VogueFood and questioning why it barely exists
There is a book called Food in Vogue. It was published by Rizzoli and collects decades of food photography from Vogue’s archives, essays by longtime critic Jeffrey Steingarten, portraits of chefs shot by Irving Penn. The New York Times once wrote that “Gourmet was to food what Vogue is to fashion.” Condé Nast, who published Gourmet, shut it down in 2009. They owned the most obvious comparison to their most famous title and for some reason…killed it.
And food has not become less important to culture since 2009. If anything, it has become the dominant cultural language of the decade. And Vogue, which covers everything food touches, whether it be fashion, beauty, luxury, celebrity, wellness, status, still does not have a vertical or an editorial identity built around the thing that is eating almost every category .
Worth noting — Vogue India has already come unusually close to naming the intersection. In March 2025, it commissioned chef and artist Eeshaan Kashyap to create a tablescape of “edible couture,” with singer Kavya Trehan modelling food as fashion. The accompanying story explicitly traced fashion’s shift from treating food as something to avoid to using dining, confectionery, and edible objects as part of its visual language. The editorial instinct is already there but alas, it just lives as an occasional feature instead of a beat.
This is the argument for @VogueFood and strategic observation about the biggest editorial white space in culture right now.
Dua Lipa Makes Roasted Sea Bass Dinner | Now Serving | Vogue
The most explicit proof that Vogue knows this and still hasn’t named it is the “Now Serving” series on Vogue’s YouTube channel. Dua Lipa headed to the Vogue kitchen in June 2025 to make a roasted sea bass with potatoes recipe that she has talked about publicly for years, tied to her Albanian heritage and her relationship to home cooking.
Vogue India sat her down to eat eight traditional French dishes with Michelin-starred chef Hélène Darroze in a mukbang format that accumulated millions of views. Tyla, British Vogue’s March 2025 cover star, pulled a bag of maize meal out of her handbag and cooked pap, boerewors, chakalaka for the camera and that video that went viral in South Africa and sparked genuine cultural conversation about representation in food media. BTS members Jin, Jimin, and V cooked janchi-guksu and misugaru in the Vogue kitchen, with Jin’s cooking skills becoming the editorial hook. Simone Ashley made a smash burger and cookies, starting with a vodka martini, for the April 2026 episode.
Clearly, these videos perform ridiculously well and they generate genuine cultural moments. Tyla’s pap and boerewors video was a very strong statement about South African culinary identity reaching a global fashion audience. Dua Lipa’s sea bass is a window into how a specific kind of cosmopolitan, heritage-connected woman thinks about cooking.
The mukbang format adopted from a Korean internet phenomenon where people eat on camera has been legitimised by Vogue’s version of it into something closer to an intimate cultural portrait.
What Vogue has not done yet, is connect these dots into a coherent editorial identity.
Yes, “Now Serving” exists as a YouTube series but it has no dedicated social handle, no editorial team commissioning food stories, no framework for understanding why these videos perform or what they reveal about the audience watching them. The food content is there but the food strategy is negligible.
And not just Now Serving, Vogue has pretty much covered almost everything that food surrounds but never explicitly named it just “Food”.
Consider this. Rhode’s entire brand identity is built on edibility. Sensory marketing. Hailey Bieber told New York Magazine “I want you to bite me. I want to be so delicious that you can’t resist.” Vogue covers Rhode constantly but has never framed it as a food story ever.
Sabrina Carpenter’s Dunkin’ campaign boosted app downloads 57% and sold out limited-edition tumblers in 17 minutes. Again, Vogue covered it as celebrity content, not as evidence that food brands are now the primary cultural distribution channel for musicians.
Nara Smith built her entire identity around cooking from scratch, then partnered with Erewhon, which Vogue Business called “more than a grocery store — a status symbol”. A grocery chain running the same scarcity and exclusivity mechanics Vogue has spent 130 years documenting in fashion. They are fashion and beauty stories wearing food as their primary language where vogue is covering the outcomes without naming the mechanism(?).
brands treating food to sell themselves
Fashion houses are entering food because food is the only category that creates daily, repeatable, embodied brand contact. Gucci Osteria turns the codes of the House into a one heck of a dining experience; Ralph’s Coffee turns Ralph Lauren into a place you can stop for coffee.
Sabyasachi’s expansion into tableware through Bengale Tigris makes the logic unusually literal: the brand’s visual world can now sit on the dining table with us.
Actually, we can speed run through a bazillion examples:
Chanel put a two-Michelin-star Alain Ducasse restaurant inside its Ginza flagship. Louis Vuitton built cafés from Seoul to Osaka, with the Seoul menu specifically mixing Korean flavours with French pastry and fine dining.
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Korean designer JUUN.J put Felt Coffee inside its Seoul flagship, turning the store into somewhere you could hang around with no pressure of having to shop.
New York indie Collina Strada literally staged a runway around a farmer’s market, sending guests home with fresh fruit as part of its climate message. Telfar, Collina Strada, Puppets and Puppets and other New York designers teamed up with Mission Chinese Food on a fashion-meets-takeout project, pairing limited-edition pieces with dishes from the restaurant.
Paris-based Studio Balbosté creates edible sets and dining experiences for Loewe, Miu Miu, Chloé and Dior. We could genuinely keep going.
The point? The strategic value of food is that it lets a fashion brand become somewhere you go without the burden of buying another piece of clothing.
food has always been independently iconic
And food does not even need a fashion collaboration, celebrity smoothie, or beauty campaign to make this argument strong. Strip every adjacent industry away and food is having an absurdly interesting cultural moment on its own.
Starting with the fact that getting into a restaurant became a commodity. In New York, reservations at sought-after restaurants became valuable enough to attract bots, brokers and third-party resale platforms. The problem became significant enough that New York had to pass the Restaurant Reservation Anti-Piracy Act, prohibiting third-party services from listing restaurant reservations without permission.
A dinner reservation had acquired enough scarcity value to require legislation and all of it continues to sound crazy.
Then there is matcha. Once a relatively specific Japanese tea category became an international café obsession, with demand rising quickly enough to put pressure on Japanese producers.
But the more interesting thing is what happened after mass adoption: consumers started learning the vocabulary. Ceremonial versus culinary. Uji versus Nishio. First harvest. Stone-ground. Preparation technique. Origin has become part of the purchase.
Next in line is Dubai chocolate. The pistachio-and-knafeh chocolate bar created in Dubai became a fixation. It contributed to a global squeeze on pistachio supply. By 2025, supermarkets were rationing some versions of the product.
Then followed the inevitable second phase: arguments about what actually counts as Dubai chocolate, where knafeh and kataifi come from, and whether mass-market “Dubai-style” products were flattening a specifically Middle Eastern culinary tradition.
Restaurants are changing and Supper clubs have returned as social spaces. Food raves are putting DJs next to kitchens. Bakeries can attract queues that look suspiciously like sneaker drops. Restaurant merchandise escapes the restaurant and gets worn by people who may care as much about what the T-shirt signals as what is on the menu. Private chefs are becoming a luxury service category built around access, personalisation and privacy.
People literally plan holidays around reservations and build itineraries around bakeries, markets and dishes they saw online.
Regional cooking is increasingly being presented with specificity rather than flattened into “Indian cuisine”: diners are being introduced to ingredients, techniques and food traditions from particular communities and geographies. Matcha cafés coexist with the desi fascination around fermentation, millet, regional produce and hyper-specific provenance.
The internet holds this weird ability to turn a single ingredient into an entire personality. Tinned fish? Aesthetic material. Hot honey? A mainstream flavour obsession. Protein has migrated into practically every single conceivable food category.
A food can now move through the same cycle as an aesthetic: niche discovery, internet fixation, visual codes, mass replication, backlash, connoisseurship, next thing, next thing and the next thing.
That is what makes the current food moment worth documenting and this article worth existing.
Food has its own trend cycles, status objects, scarcity, subcultures, celebrities, aesthetics, controversies, communities, terminology and increasingly sophisticated consumers.
A reservation can signal access and knowing an ingredient can signal taste
Food is already producing the kinds of stories Vogue was built to interpret. Fashion and beauty borrowing its language is almost beside the point.
So, is Vogue missing out? Massively.
With an unfair advantage of already having photographers who can make a dinner look like an editorial, writers who understand status and taste to the T, access to chefs and cultural figures, and 130 years of authority telling people what deserves attention.
If Vogue can make a handbag culturally consequential, imagine what it could do with something billions of people participate in every single day.
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