Dior's Agnoletti Cousu Main. Credit: Heather Stern

Food Is Fashion. Fashion Is Food.

13 Minute read

18 Mar 2026

Julie Tremaine

Journalist

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From Dior to Louis Vuitton, fashion brands are redefining dining as a curated expression of luxury.

There was a time when Kate Moss’s “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” defined the relationship between food and fashion. That time is over. Today, haute couture extends far beyond the runway, shaping how people dress, travel, and increasingly, how they dine.

Fashion houses like Chanel and Hermès have spent years building worlds that extend beyond clothing and handbags—into furniture, hotels, and fully realized lifestyle experiences. For those who can afford it, that world includes sleeping at places like the Palazzo Versace in Dubai or Macao, the Vermelho Hotel by Christian Louboutin in Portugal, or the Armani Hotel in Milan. For everyone else, the most accessible entry point is increasingly through restaurants, where fashion and food converge into a single, carefully constructed experience.

From Runway to Restaurant

The most recent example is Monsieur Dior, helmed by Dominique Crenn of San Francisco’s three-Michelin-starred Atelier Crenn. The restaurant opened in November 2025 inside Dior’s gleaming four-story flagship on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.

“Here it’s about finding the narrative that connects Crenn and Dior together. It’s the color, the texture,” Crenn said. “It’s the Dior DNA and the Crenn DNA.”

Dining steeped in high fashion is nothing new—Armani opened Armani/Ristorante in Paris in 1998—but in recent years, it has become a bona fide trend. Gucci Osteria, led by Massimo Bottura, opened in Florence in 2018, followed by Beverly Hills in 2020 (it closed in late 2025), then Tokyo in 2021, and Seoul in 2022.

Louis Vuitton opened its first café, Maxime Frédéric at Louis Vuitton, in Paris in 2022, followed by Café Louis Vuitton—its first U.S. restaurant—in New York in late 2024. In the same city, French luxury department store Printemps debuted its American flagship last March with five dining concepts led by Top Chef alum and James Beard Award winner Gregory Gourdet. Crenn, meanwhile, expanded the concept further with Café Dior in Dallas in February 2025.

What’s changed isn’t the presence of restaurants inside retail spaces, but their purpose. Department stores like Neiman Marcus and Bloomingdale’s have long offered places to eat, once catering to a predictable “ladies who lunch” crowd. Today, those spaces are being reimagined with serious culinary ambition, from Chanel’s Tokyo restaurant, Beige by Alain Ducasse, to the Blue Box Cafe, led by Daniel Boulud, inside Tiffany & Co.’s Fifth Avenue flagship. Others have become cultural hubs in their own right: L’Avenue at Saks Fifth Avenue has hosted everything from Gigi Hadid’s birthday party to a Saturday Night Live afterparty.

The Restaurant as Showroom

Think of these restaurants as living showrooms—spaces where brands stage their most aspirational vision of how to live. The experience unfolds in layers: you pass through multi-story retail environments before arriving at the dining room, where every detail has been carefully considered. The food reflects the brand, and so does everything around it, from the table settings to the room itself. At Monsieur Dior, plates cost $230, and the glassware is $390. Does that make the food taste better? Not necessarily. Does it elevate the experience? Absolutely.

At Café Louis Vuitton, the experience draws directly from the brand’s origins in luxury luggage. When Louis Vuitton opened his trunk-making business in Paris in 1854, he introduced the now-iconic flat-topped trunk design. The café sits on the top floor of the Fifth Avenue flagship, overlooking 57th Street. By the time you ascend five floors around a central atrium filled with towering vintage luggage installations, you arrive at Le Chocolat Maxime Frédéric at Louis Vuitton, a shop-within-a-shop from the acclaimed pastry chef of Paris’s Cheval Blanc.

Step through the doors into the café, and it feels like passing through a Narnia-style portal into another world: warm ambient lighting, supple leathers in neutral tones, and textiles that echo the signature LV logo, which appears on everything from plates to cappuccino foam to the edges of its ravioli. Louis Vuitton luggage tags hang from the ceiling by the hundreds, while faux trunks open to reveal the servers’ computer stations, otherwise hidden from view.

The café opened with Christophe Bellanca leading the culinary team; in December 2025, Kylian Goussot took over as executive chef. The menu leans on classical French technique to translate the brand’s iconography into food. The Truffle Eggs “à la coque,” ceramic “eggs” filled with oeuf mousseline, are served with an LV-branded brioche breadstick for dipping. Sliders, with or without seared foie gras, arrive on buns griddled with the same signature pattern. That motif carries through everything—the plates, the butter, the napkins, even the sugar bowl—yet the neutral palette keeps it feeling restrained rather than heavy-handed.

Where Fashion Becomes Food

At Monsieur Dior, the focus shifts from overt branding to interpretation. The tables are set with Dior housewares and surrounded by a gallery of them, but the dishes themselves don’t explicitly reference the label. Instead, each course draws from an archival garment or accessory from the House of Dior, founded in Paris in 1946. Perhaps it’s the Rodeo Drive setting, but dining here feels somewhere between Pretty Woman and Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris. For many guests, it will be among the most fashionable meals they ever experience—not only because of the restaurant’s buzz or its star chef, but because it brings the Dior universe to life. You may never have a Dior butler’s pantry or a team staging your table, but for a few hours, you understand what that world feels like.

You will almost certainly never be invited into Dior’s vault in Paris, where the house’s most important archival gowns are kept. Through Crenn’s food, inspired by her own visits, you can begin to understand the sensations they evoke.

“I went and spent a lot of time in the archive in Paris, in the Atelier also, and spoke with a woman who’s been there for 46 years, to really understand the philosophy,” Crenn said. Her approach to the Monsieur Dior menu draws less from the brand’s glamour than from the textures of its most storied garments. The Agnolotti Cousu Main, delicate pasta filled with mascarpone and parmesan and finished with a tableside pour of mushroom consommé, is topped with a black truffle and mushroom tuile inspired by the lace of a Dior dress. The Tuna Violette Bouquet, a dry-aged tuna tartare, is studded with floral-shaped purple yam chips that echo the detailing of another gown—so intricate it’s almost difficult to disturb.

“I’m not going to do a dish to represent [an outfit] because that would be crazy, but I took a texture of the gown,” she added. “This is what I want to bring to the dish.” The Beef Perlé draws from one of Marilyn Monroe’s most iconic looks: a black Dior gown draped with ropes of pearls. The slow-cooked short rib sits in a pool of rich demi-glace, topped with shaved black truffles and surrounded by smooth white “pearls” of cauliflower purée. On the dessert menu, the Chocolate Cannage pairs chocolate sponge and mousse with cherry confiture, finished with a velvety shell and a gold-embossed chocolate bee. Its texture and pattern echo the Lady Dior handbag, later renamed in honor of Princess Diana in 1996.

“I want to bring something [special] so people can come here and have good food,” she said. “Dior is expensive, but I think it’s worth the price.” For those seeking a taste of that world, whether at Dior or elsewhere, it may well be. What these spaces ultimately offer isn’t just a meal, but proximity: a chance to step inside a version of luxury that is usually observed from a distance. For a few hours, the fantasy holds. Whether that experience lingers or fades the moment you step back onto the street is part of the equation, too.