Snackwave: clothes you could almost eat

Snackwave was born on the internet. The term was coined by Hazel Cillis and Gabrielle Noone, two writers for the cult women's website Thehairpin.com. The website has a devoted online following due to its laser-sharp focus on the interests of young women: everything from attempts to work through emotional turmoil to the cookbook of the Kardashian matriarch, Kris Jenner. As it transpires, modern, young woman love food. Specifically, junk food.

However, a small subsection of women and men (although the landscape is dominated mostly by the former) take their love one step further, stocking their wardrobes with pizza-print shirts and cupcake rucksacks. It’s food as fashion, and, while not exactly ubiquitous, it has grown deep roots in high and low fashion.

Katy Perry is a known aficionado of snackwave clothing. Her early tours are dominated by her "so sweet, you could almost eat" costumes and sets. Perry's sweet tooth is reflected and exaggerated by ambitious outfits. We see her with blue hair, wearing a tiered skirt made entirely of cupcakes. In the California Girls video, she explores a literal candyland with a creampie bra. In public, however, she is more savoury than sickly sweet, having been caught wearing a pizza onesie on several occasions, the most recent being in a pre-recorded video for the recent MTV European Music Awards. For Halloween, Perry dressed up as a Cheeto (the closest Irish equivalent to the cheesy American crisps are Chickatees).

Pizza print crop top

Pizza is a snackwave favourite, worn by women such as Cara Delevingne and Beyoncé. While Delevingne favours the same onesie as Perry, Beyoncé favoured a more high-fashion approach, wearing a pizza-print crop-top and trousers by Japanese designer Kiko Mizuhara. Both, it should be noted, favour pizza of the pepperoni variety.

While junk food is affordable, junk food clothing can be bought at any price range. Jeremy Scott’s premiere collection for Moschino was based heavily on McDonald’s, with bags mocked up to look like soft drink containers and packets of chips. For the same collection, the catwalk finale was a range of irony-heavy ballgowns emblazoned with silken sweet wrappers.

Accessory designer Anya Hindmarch’s most covetable bag looks like a squashed crisp packet (left). The bag costs four figures and has a long waiting list. Recently, British department store Selfridges released limited-edition crisp packet clutches in rose, white and yellow gold; the cost: £60,000 (€75,000). While foil wrappers are disposable, this bag is not; it takes a craftsperson up to four months to correctly crumple the metal in an Italian atelier. Meanwhile, mass-printed pizza T-shirts can be bought for less than €10 on

eBay

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Even Vogue is taking note. This month's food feature is a meditation on Coca-Cola, written at the behest of Kate Moss. This is not the first time Moss has met the soft drink in British Vogue; she was snapped sipping the stuff by the artist Sarah Morris for the May 2000 cover.

Collective need to share

To first understand snackwave, one must have a firm grip on youth culture. Social-networking websites such as Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr feed into a collective need to share everything. On the internet, the new culture of too much information and oversharing means we wear our hearts on our sleeves and our food all over our clothes without the need for a napkin to wipe it up.

Snackwave also taps into the fetishisation of food. Readers who are active on Instagram will agree that food, both healthy and not, is plated up not to be tasty but to be appealing to the eye on the app. Instagram is dominated by pictures of food, and food is used to say something about the person who shares it. While healthy meals and homemade smoothies are posted to spread the message that the person enjoying them has a tight grip on her own vices, junk food is used to portray coolness and a “let it all hang out” attitude.

However, one can only share junk food experiences for so long before seams start splitting and breathing gets laboured. So if one is to continue to enjoy pizza and cake on a daily basis, it may be best to do it with clothing.