HAUTE CUISINE

This season, designers offered up a veritable banquet of food-inspired fashion.

- Marian Bull

Chez Panisse, the Bay Area locavore mecca helmed by chef Alice Waters, has long served a singularly minimalist dessert at its casual upstairs café: ripe fruit in a bowl.

To select the right figs or pears or olallieberries for each bowl, Chez Panisse's kitchen staff carefully tracks the ripeness of each one, sorting, sniffing, and prodding them throughout the day. The goal of the dish is to celebrate not just the bounty that the restaurant receives from local farmers daily, but its innate potential. It venerates an Edenic ur-fruit, and invites the diner to the table to worship as well.

For Carolina Herrera's 2023 resort collection, designer Wes Gordon similarly devoted himself to an essentialist fruit print that adorns a number of his pieces. On a billowing off-the-shoulder dress, demure but for the collarbones it bares and a playful high slit, supersize red cherries the size of a toddler's fist seem so ripe they might bleed into their cream-colored background. It's the sort of thing you might wear while strolling through an orchard at golden hour, if you trusted yourself not to stain the dress with the juice of just-bitten fruit.