Cupcakes as fashion statements

Andrea Adleman

When Sex and the City popularized cupcakes, the baked goods were less a food and more a fashion accessory. The Fashion Institute of Technology in New York explores this concept in Food & Fashion, an exhibition at the school’s museum. The section interrogating “Sugar, Spice, and Everything Nice?” examines the historical connection between women, sweets, and fashion.

Photo by the Museum at FIT. A wider view is visible here.
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The exhibition includes contemporary references to dessert-inspired fashion, such as handbags by Judith Leiber. The designer’s cupcake bag appeared in the first Sex and the City movie. It’s not part of the exhibition, but the following text is applicable to cupcakes.

Today, popular food trends for artisanal desserts have led to long lines at high-end bakeries that rival those for the latest streetwear drops, making Judith Leiber’s dessert-inspired handbags a timely sartorial indulgence. Her decadent minaudiéres, disguised as bejeweled pink donuts or ice cream treats, speak to recurring tropes connecting sweets and femininity. Their luxury status also relates to elite indulgences in both food and fashion.

— Food & Fashion exhibition informational panel

Designer and former InStyle fashion director Hal Rubenstein was interviewed by People about his new book Dressing the Part: Television’s Most Stylish Shows. Here he refers to cupcakes in their fashion context.

Sex and the City said, ‘No, this [city] is Disneyland for adults. It’s all bright and shiny and it’s full of fun and cosmos and sex and cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery and all the Manolos you want. It made brands like Manolo, like the Fendi Baguette, household names. Even if people [watching] couldn’t afford a Fendi Baguette, they all knew what it was.

— Hal Rubinstein in People

Meanwhile, a D.C.-area artist is making a statement with Georgetown Cupcake iconography.

The shoe is included in the Overboard exhibit, a pop-art show of Air Jordans designed to comment on modern consumer culture.

These two current exhibitions follow the co-branded clothing that New York or Nowhere created with Magnolia Bakery in 2021.

Since its 2014 founding, the Brooklyn bakery EATGOODNYC is the fashion industry’s choice to design branded cupcakes. Using baked goods as an artistic canvas, co-owner Carolina Wang prefers to tell stories with cupcakes rather than full-sized cakes.