“I’m not there to decorate an event. I’m there to shape what it means and how it feels,” says Idan Gilony, a Berlin-based entrepreneur and leading figure in conceptual, high fashion dining. “I describe myself as a creative director and curator.”
Gilony has just finished working on an event for Jimmy Choo, ideating and arranging a dessert table inspired by the current collection for the brand’s Zurich store re-opening. Esteemed for his tablescapes, painstakingly designed canapés and Yves Klein-blue cocktails, the self-starter is not a chef; Gilony originally worked in fashion design, before going all in on dining creative in 2024 after trialing his own immersive take on dinner parties. Brands quickly responded, coming to him to communicate a theme or a collection through spatial design and avant-garde tablescapes.
Gilony is one of many polymaths broaching a growing market for luxury dining experiences aimed at a culturally cacheted, fashion-loving clientele. His peers include cross-disciplinary chef Imogen Kwok; Substacker-cum-cook Jago Rackham; and Nil Mutluer (aka Healgoblin), a self-described “culinary artist” who frequently translates briefs from labels such as Miu Miu, Penhaligon’s, and Nike into finely tuned, food-based experiences.
More broadly, fashion brands are turning to dining hotspots to attract style-conscious gourmands. During men’s fashion month, JW Anderson celebrated its Diadora collaboration at Bar Basso, the historic Milanese aperitivo joint renowned for its negroni sbagliato, while Supreme took over Paris’s legendary Café La Perle with a collaged mural and team dinner a month prior. Earlier, streetwear brand Aries collaborated with East London bakery and natural wine purveyor, Jolene, for a capsule collection and permanent in-store bakery, opened at its Soho flagship in April. In February, Ami Paris collaborated with New York’s revered French bistro, Balthazar, for a one-month takeover complete with Ami-logoed loaves and menus.
It’s a temporary, more indie answer to established luxury eateries like Tiffany’s Blue Box Café and Le Café Louis Vuitton. “Dining is becoming an increasingly important tool for engaging top-tier clients. Exclusive dinners, chef-led events and destination dining experiences help luxury brands build deeper loyalty and stronger relationships with VICs, fashion guests and brand communities,” says Fflur Roberts, head of luxury at Euromonitor International, citing Mytheresa’s use of intimate and exclusive dining as part of its clientelling strategy.
Per Euromonitor’s data, global experiential luxury grew 10% in the past year, driven by strong performance in luxury food service (+9%). The market research company forecasts a 23% expansion over the next five years, with luxury food service increasing by 37% in the same period. For comparison, personal luxury goods grew just 5% last year, highlighting experiences — such as fashion-adjacent dining — in driving value creation and consumer engagement in the luxury sector.
Since 2023, experiences have mostly contributed positively to luxury’s overall growth, says Federica Levato, senior partner at Bain & Co. “Within that, gourmet food and fine dining specifically has been propelled by consumers seeking wellness, self-reward, and social connection.” Still, while brands have already moved into these adjacent categories, “partly to bring back aspirational customers who’ve been priced out of core categories”, the consumer interest comes with a risk of diluting brand authenticity. The key, Levato notes, is ensuring that investments feel like a natural extension rather than bolted on.
Players wanting to see bang for their buck and a clearer enhancement of their value proposition should take a disciplined approach, considering the branding narrative, the clarity of the partnership, and the quality of the partner. In this arena, authenticity drives reach and a return on investment.
Signaling taste
It’s a tough balance to strike, and that’s because taste — in every sense — sits at the core of a strong food partnership. “Today, knowing the right restaurant, chef, dish, or bakery is a form of status and cultural fluency,” says Bia Bezamat, cultural insights director at market research firm Kantar. “That aligns naturally with fashion, which has always been about signaling taste, identity, and belonging.” Bezamat adds that, for Gen Z, food sits within the same visual ecosystem as fashion and culture, such that the restaurants they visit, the drinks they carry, and the meals they post online serve as performances of taste. For her, the opportunity is not simply to host a beautiful dinner, but to treat food as “a language of identity, discovery, and shareability”.
Often, relationships between eateries and brands come about through a shared appreciation for craft and attention to detail, which trickles down to consumers. Menswear label Drake’s, for instance, provides the uniforms for Maison François, the London brasserie; it has also collaborated with nose-to-tail London restaurant St. John on two capsule collections of laidback tailoring and hardy workwear; and it produced a twill souvenir-style cap for restaurant-slash-wine-bar-gallery Sessions Arts Club in 2025.
“Restaurants have always played a role in Drake’s world,” says Drake’s creative director Michael Hill. “We like somewhere that has some similarity to what we envision our stores as doing — somewhere people can come and feel comfortable, looked after, and inspired.” Sessions Arts Club founder Jonny Gent says that events account for a growing share of revenue, and the space has worked with other creatives, like Martine Rose, Our Legacy, and Toogood.
This pursuit of highly considered dining experiences is a white whale for brands. “Luxury fashion is becoming increasingly gourmet, not because brands want to be in the restaurant business, but because food embodies many of the qualities that define modern luxury: craftsmanship, exclusivity, ritual, and experience,” says Bezamat, noting the importance of food’s inherent intimacy. “In an era of increasingly polished, AI-generated content, it’s messy, raw and builds connection. A hero product can signal status, but food can quickly evoke atmosphere, desire and emotional proximity.”
In this vein, the Ami Paris collaboration with Balthazar delivered, capitalizing on something of a local institution. “It was really about celebrating a place that has genuine emotional value for me and for so many people in fashion,” says creative director and founder Alexandre Mattiussi. “Fashion has always been about much more than clothes. It’s about culture, conversations, friendships, and rituals. The best places aren’t fashionable because they’re designed to be — they become iconic because they have authenticity and consistency over time.”
The brand reports over a million impressions on Instagram and 529,000 on TikTok off the back of the collaboration. On the three days that Ami Paris activated a branded Balthazar cart outside its SoHo flagship, foot traffic to the store was up 55% and sales were up 21% versus the prior year. Additionally, the brand also generated over 1,300 new customer leads and 3,000 additional e-commerce sessions during the takeover period.
“For an activation rooted in hospitality rather than traditional advertising, those are very meaningful results,” says CMO Carlo Mengucci. “The mechanics were threefold: build cultural credibility through brand awareness, engage a community that would generate organic storytelling, and convert that desirability into measurable business impact.”
The culinary creator
In this sector, it’s often the food-fluencing creators who set the bar for strong concept menus, demonstrating their expertise online, and entertaining a sizable pool of luxury consumers while developing new ones. The opportunity has opened an opportunity for these specialists at the intersection of food and fashion to become the ushers of these brand experiences.
“Brands have realized that food is one of the most universal ways of communicating with people,” says Mutluer. “Unlike many forms of marketing, it’s participatory. You don’t just observe it, you experience it together.” For brands, Mutluer delivers menus, bespoke dishes, and food-based installations, chiming with a campaign or launch’s messaging. Often, her process is documented online — she might take an object, a beauty product, a piece of clothing or a specific ingredient, and incorporate this into her process, showcasing her recipe development with a given product integrated as a prop.
Creative consultant and cook Kirthanaa Naidu has worked full-time in a similar capacity for the past three years, counting Hermès and Miu Miu among clients. These briefs usually start with a call to better understand the collection or product’s objective and target client. From there, Naidu develops a menu, taking into account the season, palette, textures, and materials underpinning the launch. She says that as her business has grown, the in-person experience remains her most important metric of success. “I’m really interested in how guests engage with the food and the conversations it creates,” adds Naidu. “Digital engagement is a great way to see how a project has resonated more widely, but it’s always secondary to creating something memorable for the people who are there.”
Siblings Missy Flynn and Cameron Malik-Flynn have been at the forefront of fashion’s culinary evolution, heading up the 2024-founded food and beverage agency, Malik Acid. Flynn also runs Rita’s — the esteemed London small plates restaurant — which she co-founded in 2012 with Gabriel Pryce. “We launched [Rita’s] at a time when the intersection between food, drinks, and the creative space was pretty much uncharted territory; it just didn’t really exist,” says Flynn. Quickly, brands began commissioning Rita’s for residencies and launch events, trusting them to produce “genuine and relevant food and dining experiences” reliant on quality ingredients.
Brands want partners they can trust, plus visual appeal. Take, Iné, the former fashion PR Sarah Ueta’s company founded in 2021, which scaled from a bento box provider into a fully fledged catering brand to the fashion industry, complete with its own restaurant. Ueta produces dinners with an haute-joaillerie level of detail, taking into account her clients’ demands. Iné grew revenues 25% and 20%, from 2023 to 2024 and 2024 to 2025, respectively. “I see 2026 as our next major milestone,” says Ueta. “My focus now is to develop the event catering side of the business even further, where what we offer isn’t just food, but creative direction and bespoke concepts.”
A new appetite
Getting these partnerships right requires nuance. As this micro-industry has taken off, the demands and expectations have shifted. With a substantially larger number of players now competing for market share, bespoke-ification becomes increasingly significant. For Gen Z, especially, where brand loyalty is low, activations and partnerships need to offer more than canapés and heavy-handed branding, attuning their offering to a contemporary consumer.
“Personalized nutrition, functional ingredients, longevity-led menus, and sophisticated low or no-alcohol options are gaining importance, while GLP-1 medications are accelerating shifts towards smaller portions, mindful indulgence, protein, gut health, and reduced alcohol intake,” says Euromonitor’s Roberts. “For luxury dining, this is less about restriction and more about refinement, with greater focus on provenance, sensory exploration, premium non-alcoholic pairings, and personalized wellness-led experiences.”
Standing out also requires research. Players keen to cut through the noise will need to dig into a culinary concept with the same rigor as an art director approaching a campaign. The menu needs a story and narrative clarity. Take Malik Acid’s approach to a Miu Miu event in London last summer. “The briefing included ‘best of the summer produce’, and from there, as a fashion show might begin, we asked ourselves a question to prompt the development: what does a strawberry actually taste like?” says Malik-Flynn. “We began to deep dive into the layers of flavor — sweetness, red fruits, subtle green and bitter notes, touches of acidity — [asking] how we could rebuild that without relying on the color red to signify the drinks profile.”
For a partnership with skincare brand The Ordinary, the team used naturally occurring acids for the beverages that coincided with a product launch. “There was a practicality to that brief that felt like we could work authentically to ourselves, but also capture everything that was important to the brand, too,” she adds. “I feel there’s nothing worse than an event or activation that feels half-baked or tenuous.”
Indeed, best-in-class activations should look beyond clumsy messaging towards a quieter, integrated campaign throughline. “My process is always the same,” says Mutluer. “I look for the conceptual thread first. Once I understand the narrative, everything else follows naturally: the dishes, colors, materials, serving vessels, and the choreography of how people move through and experience the food.”
That caliber of detail matters. The market for curated culinary experiences is a promising one, and a smart bridge for fashion to tap into as consumer demand shifts away from tangible goods to sensorial experiences. But it’s competitive; the players that come out on top will be those willing to invest in conceptual, innovative, and premium dining. Done right, Roberts reinforces the value of this for brands. “Gastronomy transforms luxury from an object into a lived experience,” she says. “Through interiors, service, culinary storytelling and social engagement, branded food service concepts extend dwell time, build emotional affinity and create softer pathways to purchase.”
Source: Vogue
