Haute Couture for Lunch
Garments and fashion accessories made from groceries aren’t a novelty in the fashion and art world, as Lady Gaga recently demonstrated. However, when contemplating the sphere of food and fashion Korean artist Sung Yeonju most certainly deserves a mention. She conquered the art world with a series of fascinating dresses made out of various groceries named “Wearable Foods“. Yeonju was born in Seoul in 1986, and graduated design in 2010 from the Hong Ik University in Seoul. She’s currently devoted to creating diverse garments from bread, omelettes and spring onions.
However, her main medium is photography which turns her edible garments into every woman’s dream. Yeonju takes a shot of each carefully “cooked” dress, thus immortalizing it in its crispness. The “Wearable Foods” series is a long term project Yeonju started two years ago and is still in the making. The artist questions the concept of creating apparitions always teetering on the verge of reality and fantasy or illustration. However, the goal is to destroy the very meaning of clothes, forcing viewers to defy the actual meaning, the functionalities, and the aspects of what clothing signifies in our lives. At the same time a desire for feeding emerges, instantly thwarted by the very act of “tailoring”. The essence of clothing and food has been reinterpreted. Each element does not fulfill its own role and yet, each suggests an unconventional and even contradicting role – un-wearable clothing that is made out of the materials that do not last. Still, the superbly staged shots hardly convey such an impression.
Click here for more info on the artist.
Photographs: Sung Yeonju
