Aisles of Absurdity: Fashion's Take on Supermarket Culture

Fashion’s latest must-have accessory is…. a bottle of boujee bleach? Moschino’s recent Spring/Summer 2025 collection at Milan Fashion Week was playfully dubbed “Piece of Sheet,” and aimed to subvert household items into “subjects of obsession”. Look five featured a model carrying a bag resembling a bottle of Clorox bleach while look three on the other hand saw a model pairing her white asymmetrical pirate-sleeve ruffle dress with an old-fashioned kettle-shaped purse. “The everyday is sublimated, the ordinary made extraordinary, our perspective altered,” reads the official press notes from the Moschino collection.

This is hardly the first time Moschino has subverted a household appliance into a piece of fashion. First launched in 2015, Moschino’s Fresh Couture fragrance for women resembled a bottle of Windex. Similarly, at the helm of Balenciaga, Demna is known to subvert seemingly ordinary items into expensive staples. This was seen with the USD 1,790 calfskin leather bag that closely resembled a black plastic trash bag, the USD 2,288 tote bag that resembled Ikea’s “Frakta” bag and the USD 1,850 potato chip bag famously held by actor Michael Shanon at the 2024 Met Gala in May with the theme of “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion”.

Transforming mundane objects into luxury goods proved to be profitable as “these are conversation pieces,” reads an article from The Wall Street Journal. The article goes on to note that most consumers are not going to buy these bags for the brand, but rather the brands use them as bait. Gen Zs and millennials spend their time online on Instagram and TikTok which are “major vehicles for fashion change.” “By going viral, a brand gets a halo of cultural cachet,” reads a quote from the article.

Emotional Consumption

Emotional consumption is the notion that consumers do not buy products for what they do, but instead, they buy items for how they make them feel. In the fashion industry, luxury brands are not necessarily selling a leather bag, they are instead selling one status or an idea of what it is to feel and be “rich”. On the note of absurdity, 2023 saw MSCHF (pronounced “mischief”) master the art of clickbait with the brand’s viral microscopic bag and absurd red boots. Their speck-sized tote measured all of 657 by 222 and 700 micrometers which is equivalent to about the size of a grain of salt. The neon green creation was a take on Louis Vuitton’s monogram tote bag and was intended to be a commentary on the “impracticality of ever-shrinking luxury handbags”.

At a digital auction, the “bag” went on to sell for approximately USD 63,750. MSCHF then outdid themselves with cartoon-esque 3D boots which was once again a social commentary. Constructed from a TPU rubber shell, the boot’s abstract shape was intended to “free us from the constraints of reality” stating that the “continued blending of virtual and IRL aesthetic has us chasing supernormal stimuli”.

Fashion’s subversion of everyday items — instilled with fantasy, surrealism and whimsicality — has increased the visibility of mundane items and experiences. California-based Erewhon supermarket leverages on consumers’ need to indulge in the luxury of the everyday at a time when prices of daily groceries are skyrocketing. The Federal Trade Commission notes that executives of supermarket chains have boasted about how inflation was “great for their bottom line”. As arguably one of the most expensive supermarkets in the world, Erewhon’s reputation for high-end offerings and premium prices on (rather regular) food products, drinks and snacks, has made it a popular destination for celebrities and the ultra-wealthy.

An MSN article highlights that Erewhon offers premium services such as valet parking for a yearly fee of USD 200. The store also features a diverse range of items, from gourmet smoothies and ready-to-eat meals to hyper-oxygenated water. However, Erewhon’s prices are considerably higher than those of other upscale retailers; for instance, they sell a 2.5-pound organic rotisserie chicken for USD 22.50, whereas Whole Foods lists the same item for USD 11.99. This further exemplifies America’s perpetual fascination with hypermarkets, particularly Erewhon Market — further separating the gap between aspiration and practicality.

Capitalism or Camp?

The fashion industry is inherently camp. Camp is a prevalent marketing tool in industries many things as Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay, Notes on Camp, infamously points out. Camp is largely about caricatures — the exaggerated and parodied. According to Sontag, camp targets serious topics but cannot be taken seriously itself, precisely because it seeks to destabilise what constitutes seriousness in the first place. Case in point, Fendi’s Chupa Chups lollipop collaboration for the brand’s Autumn/Winter 2024 fashion show which saw Fendi unveil the Chupa Chups lollipop holder. This piece features details reminiscent of the renowned Selleria technique, accented with a metal FF logo. The charm comes packaged in a special Chupa Chups x FENDI box, which includes five limited edition Cacao-Vanilla lollipops, honoring the five Fendi sisters.

As LUXUO reported last year, camp art is that which turns tragedy into comedy, sincerity into artifice, and seriousness into frivolousness. The genre of camp hence becomes a powerful tool for subversion, for caricatures have the unique ability to flip linear power structures on their heads. This is particularly poignant as there is a cost of living crisis in many parts of the world particularly in major cities like New York and London.

So has capitalism killed the supermarket experience? Well, fashion’s hyper-fantasising use of the supermarket experience in campaigns and collections has increased certainly visibility to the mundane, transforming essential shopping into a spectacle of consumerism. There is something to be said about twisting something as seemingly mundane into a surreal runway showcase. The supermarket was once a place where people buy daily necessities and fashion made it frivolous. Leveraging this trend by bloating prices well beyond their cost of production for larger profit margins only exemplifies how increasingly disconnected large organisations are from real-life expectations aside from a fraction of their consumers. Erewhon Market exemplifies the trend of transforming grocery shopping into a luxurious experience, often drawing in consumers seeking an aesthetic rather than practical grocery shopping.

While some might argue that Chanel’s Autumn/Winter 2014 collection by Karl Lagerfeld, could be a twenty-first-century iteration of Marie Antoinette’s rumoured tone-deaf comment of “Let Them Eat Cake”, it could also be a social commentary on the pinnacle of desire in a materialistic world. The irony of course, being a luxury fashion house using satire to comment on materialism when that is essentially the foundation of the fashion industry — making consumers desire or buy into a fantasy.

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