Good Enough To Eat

The year is 2014. The Instagram feed, chronological. At the premiere for Baz Luhrmann’s Chanel No. 5: The One That I Want that October, Bobbi Salvör Menuez sparked a minor media frenzy on the red carpet. The flame-haired model, muse, and actor stunned in head-to-toe Chanel, an apricot suit-dress and black blouse. But then there was their purse: a small accessory the shape of a cream-cheese-filled bagel, off of which a Chanel-logo chain deceptively dangled.

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The bag was fake, but many took it to be real. One tabloid headline declared it “carb couture,” while another fashion reporter wrote Menuez “must be really important, or Karl Lagerfeld’s roommate because the bag has not been spotted in Chanel’s recent collections.” In any case, the record was soon set straight: The piece was not the French fashion house’s newest drop but rather the punchline of a joke on luxury consumer goods by Chloe Wise. The title? Bagel No. 5.

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Now 33, the artist behind the bagel speaks with a sharp, quick-witted cadence as she moves fluidly between wisecracks and the headier, zeitgeist-savvy concepts that have long informed her practice. “It was sort of like, Haha, isn’t it funny that in the ’90s and early 2000s there was so much status in such a small little dysfunctional bag,” Wise recalls of the moment as she paces in front of Switzerland’s Museum of Natural History during Art Basel. “I was drawing a parallel between the uselessness of a beautiful, status-symbol object, like a purse that you can’t actually put anything in, and an artwork you put on a wall that doesn’t actually have any utilitarian value, aside from being a placeholder for value.”

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The conflation of Chanel and a bagel (with cream cheese!) still tickles me—a former serial fashion intern when no physical trait or item was as fashionable as the singular quality of being rail-thin. During his reign as creative director, Lagerfeld was notorious for publicly griping about the appearance of women who did not meet the preternatural level of skinny he saw as acceptable. Indicative of the times was a popular satirical Instagram page titled You Did Not Eat That, which mocked the period’s fashion bloggers posing duck-lipped with their baked goods and other decadent treats untouched. (Strangely enough, its final post was also in fall of 2014.)

A native of Montreal, Wise graduated from Concordia University in 2013 with a bachelor’s degree in fine art. She briefly assisted the Canadian artist Kent Monkman, who is known for his massive paintings that embody a sort of Baroque- and Romantic-movement drama and take up his Indigenous heritage as subject matter. At the end of 2013, she relocated to New York City, where she had stints in the studios of Turner Prize-winner Martin Creed as well as O.G. Tumblr satirist and general jokester Brad Troemel. In the years following, Wise shifted her focus to portrait paintings of friends and muses. She has exhibited both her sculptures and paintings at solo shows at Almine Rech and The Journal Gallery as well as had others on view at the likes of Gagosian, Jeffrey Deitch, and the New Museum.

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In 2015, Wise made another fake Chanel purse, Pancakes No. 5, with a stack of thick flapjacks topped off with a pad of butter and a river of maple syrup. A convoy of other carb-shaped bags spun off that same year. There was Wise’s Fendi Baguette that swaps the fashion brand’s iconic, compact rectangular purse for a literal representation of a loaf of the bread French women carry home from their local boulangerie. Her Croissant Dior imagines a croissant attached to a Dior-logo strap. Belgian Moschino Waffles predictably sports Moschino insignia, and the silhouette of a bag is formed by two powdered sugar-topped waffles. In 2018, Wise took aim at another division of Chanel with Chanel Lasagna: a vast slab of layered pasta noodles laid across the inside of a larger-than-life branded makeup compact. More recently, the artist sculpted massive leaves of romaine lettuce for Caesar Salad Chandelier, 2021, complete with creamy dressing dripping down the fronds.

Wise has two methods to make her sculptural accessories like these believable. For objects such as breads and pastries, she’ll take a silicone mold directly off of a real-life version of her muse. For others, she opts for hand-sculpted replicas, as with her pancakes. The artist then casts each silicone mold in liquid urethane, takes the resulting plastic shape, and finishes it with oil paint using her considerable eye for pigment and hue. Wise finds a particular pleasure in finishing the works with liquid or “drizzly” textures. “The details that come when I add sauces and butters are most appealing to me,” she says. “I am almost method acting. I pretend that I’m making that food, and for a moment I really can suspend disbelief. I’m smearing the butter; I’m dressing the salad.”

A decade after Bagel No. 5’s viral designer-dupe moment, the original levels of irony have melted away from legibility like a mound of butter on toast. But the visual still resonates, albeit less in a tongue-in-cheek way. Taking stock of the countless designs in the same vein as Wise’s sculptural lexicon, the appeal lies more in the lush, instantaneous impact of the aesthetic combination: namely, faux food plus the insinuation of luxury goods. The surface-level blending of food and fashion has proved to be a surefire viral formula as algorithmic social feeds elevate the most lauded to exponential visibility. (The very concept of this magazine has tapped into this shift, while also flouting the notion that fashionistas must turn their nose up come mealtime.) “You put two things that are beautiful and feel fine together, but then you know they’re not supposed to be together,” she says of visually enticing food-as-sculpture. “Something about it feels off-putting.”

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The shift is even more apparent in the mainstream, where corporate America has inflated it with a megaphone whose volume never softens. Marketers even have a term
for it—“sensory marketing”—which amplifies the satisfying visual, tactile, or auditory qualities that resonate with the product at hand. In fashion and beauty, this has manifested across social media with brands peddling products juxtaposed with some delicious-looking thing. Look no further for a consummate, contemporary example than the early imagery drumming up the launch of Hailey Bieber’s makeup line, wherein, in one instance, she presses a glazed donut onto her cheek, the beige pastry’s glistening, flaky texture both echoing and contrasting with her skin’s dewy, sun-kissed complexion.

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“I am almost method acting. I pretend that I’m making that food, and for a moment I really can suspend disbelief. I’m smearing the butter; I’m dressing the salad.”
— Chloe Wise

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Few have given more thought to the nature of that appeal than Wise, an Instagram virtuoso herself. “You’re drawing attention to the materiality, to the meaning of that object in a way that you otherwise overlook,” she says. Wise verbally paints a picture for me: “In real life, for example, a plate of pasta or a glazed cinnamon roll or a plate of Caesar salad is appealing when it first arrives to the table, when the thing is steaming and warm, when it looks beautiful, when it’s still fresh and ready to be consumed.” What then? “Then you dig into it, and at the end of the meal, the plate is a disgusting mess that you can’t really wait for the waiters to take off the table.”

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Picture-perfect dishes suspended in sculptural form become something of a reminder of our mortality for the artist. “There’s the abjection of what was once appealing, that undergoes the process of being consumed, and you are left with its bones. There are the same parallels in life: female beauty and youth as a beautiful budding flower, and the inevitable wilting of the flower, people aging and eventually dying,” she elaborates, suddenly taking on the disposition of a Romance-era novelist, bursting with dark, lovesick poetry. “Built into food is the idea that food will not be fresh forever. There’s something uncanny and gross about a Caesar salad, a piece of lettuce dripping with glistening dressing.”

There’s no question that Wise’s purse-food-sculptures forged their own singular occasion in pop culture and viral history, an impact not lost on Menuez 10 years on. “I still love that series, the kind of perversity and layers at play,” reflects the actor, who now also runs the food-art collective Spiral Theory Test Kitchen with Precious Okoyomon and Quori Theodor. “Food as a psychosexual medium is certainly of interest to me. You don’t have to know art history to feel something about the sheen of syrup dripping over a stack of pancakes.”

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For the record, Wise isn’t bothered by the endless iterations of consumer goods that resemble her food-forward sculptural language, including those by international fashion empires. Just a quick Google search reveals the slew of bags in the shapes of bread loaves, burgers, tacos, bagels, fruit, and beyond that have come into creation in the years since. In a cultural landscape where authorship has become so nebulous, how can anyone really claim dibs on an idea alone, divorced from any concrete realization of it that they’ve produced? One might as well take copycats, however untraceable their inspiration, as the highest compliment. “Built into being easily appreciated, or beautiful, or having legs, if something has that appeal, then it’s going to have the ability to proliferate,” says Wise. “I never got mad at being copied. I left it to everyone to whisper amongst themselves, ‘Isn’t that Chloe Wise-coded?’ when something looks like something that I made. I don’t even want to take credit. I mean, I do, but I don’t because I think I just picked up on a zeitgeist.” After all, there’s plenty of precedent in her food-inspired sculptures, too, from the Dutch Golden Age genre painters to Surrealist superstar Salvador Dalí to the late Modernist darling Claes Oldenburg—and many more. Attribution be damned.

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The artist is still taking the formula to new heights with her facetious sensibilities. Next up, she’s crafting two new chandeliers: one, inspired by a simple crudité platter—“carrots and celery that are going to be dripping in chunky ranch,” she describes—and the second, a seafood tower, which will feature oysters and the like, presented on fake ice.

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To whatever extent Wise’s works arouse the senses, there is certainly a sense that the artist has tapped into an ouroboros-style of culture, where everything spirals around itself. It seems whatever is truly novel will ultimately arise from glitches and irregularities in this cycle. In any case, it’s certainly been enough to keep us rapt. Not to mention, always hungry for more.