Edible Theme Clothing

Sweet or savory? Your pick.

This is where "You are what you eat," and "Clothes make the man," come together.

In an unconventional way, a food item or several is made or converted into clothing. Sometimes, people, and the wearer, will be tempted to eat the clothes until the wearer is in the buff. It can be made of meat, cake, sweets, vegetables, and fruit. It can also be made of food wrappers or even liquids like honey or drinks.

In a Level Ate setting, expect characters to wear these kinds of clothes. They will also have a high chance of Edible Theme Naming.

If in a wedding, whether in a creative mood or in economic constraints, the bride can merge the wedding dress and wedding cake together, becoming a living Dolly Varden cake.

Sub-Trope to Improvised Clothes and Unconventional Food Usage. Sister Trope to Garden Garment should they overlap with fruits and vegetables, Eggshell Clothing, Body Sushi, and Tutti Frutti Hat. Compare the rough opposites Eating Shoes, where a character eats their clothes out of poverty or desperation, and Clothes-Eating Wager, where a character is betted to eat their own clothes should they lose.

See Anthropomorphic Food if the characters ARE food.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You: In chapter 58, Kurumi's "freedom outfit" is a macaroon fairy outfit covered in edible macaroons.
• One Piece:
  • Wanze, a chef who works as a government agent, surrounds himself in an armour made of ramen noodles when fighting Sanji. The noodles are so thick and sticky that blunt attacks just get absorbed into the armour and leave the attacker stuck. Sanji hates people who waste food, so he intends to beat Wanze and make him eat every last noodle so they don't go to waste.
  • Charlotte Cracker has a Devil Fruit power that allows him to create extremely hard biscuits in various shapes and sizes. He uses these biscuits to create a suit of armour that makes him look much larger than he really is, and the biscuits are filled with red jam so Cracker looks like he's bleeding when he gets hit, tricking opponents into underestimating him.

Films - Animated

• Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs:
  • Discussed when Sam says that if they fail to deactivate the machine that's making it rain Giant Food, they'll have to live underground and wear bacon for clothes.
  • When Flint puts Sam's hair in a ponytail as part of curing her Closet Geekhood, he makes the scrunchie out of jello.
• Despicable Me 2: In one scene, Gru wears (and eats) a hat made of corn chip.

Literature

• There's occasional reference in Discworld to towns in the Sto Plains making boots, coats and so on out of the omnipresent cabbages, but usually they're processed into actual fabric first. Makepeace Thomas Bounder, "the poet of the cabbages" from The Discworld Almanack, wanted to make it quite clear that he could gain everything he needed from his beloved vegetables, and is illustrated by Paul Kidby as looking something like a walking greengrocer's stall.
• Pinky Dinky Doo: In one story, Pinky writes a story to entertain Tyler, in which all of the kids' shoes go missing, so they start wearing food as shoes. When they find that the cafeteria is serving shoes, they decide to eat their "food shoes" and wear their "shoe food". This grosses Tyler out, but Pinkie tells him to just take it as Artistic License.

Live Action TV

• Bear in the Big Blue House: In "The Big Sleep", Tutter wears a pita bread on his head, and calls himself Pita Head. Bear says that pita bread is food, not clothes, but Tutter then calls Bear silly.
• Project Runway has more than once asked their designer contestants to make a dress from "materials found in a grocery store". The first-season winner used cornhusks for a dress. Another challenge involved using candies from Hershey's for clothing, which resulted in outfits using chocolate wrappers and Twizzlers.
• The Nanny: In "The Prenup," Fran, ever The Fashionista, wears a dress made entirely of candy wrappers stitched together. It can be seen here.
• Sesame Street: One skit parodying James Bond, "The Spy Who Loved Cookies", has a woman wearing a crown made of cookies.

Music

• Katy Perry's "California Gurls" has her and the human denizens of Candyfornia wearing candy-themed clothing, such as bras designed like cupcakes, peppermints, and whipped cream bottles worn by Katy at the end of the music video.
• "Weird Al" Yankovic: "Perform This Way", a parody of Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" themed around her notoriously bizarre public shenanigans, references her infamous meat dress in the second chorus. The music video accordingly features a model in a recreation of said dress, with Al's face superimposed onto her.
  I strap prime rib to my feet, cover myself with raw meat
  I'll bet you've never seen a skirt steak worn this way!

Sports

• Green Bay Packers fans are known as "cheeseheads" (since the home state is known for its cheese), and a traditional apparel for the fans are large styrofoam, cheese-shaped hats.

Toys

• Several food-themed Lalaloopsy characters have outfits made of food. For example, Jelly Wiggle Jiggle has a gelatin dress, while Bun Bun Sticky Icing has a cinnamon roll dress.

Video Games

• Among Us: There's a top hat made out of cheese, with a bite taken out of the rim.
• Animal Crossing: New Horizons has several DIY recipes that allow the player to make outfits out of the fruits you can find on the island.
• Reimagining :the game:: Lady Gaga wears a super meat dress in her level as a reference to the time she did that in real life.
• Pikmin Bloom: Some Decor Pikmin wear scraps of food as accessories:
  • Pikmin found by supermarkets wear either mushroom caps or banana pieces.
  • Bakery Pikmin wear pieces of bread.
  • Sweetshop Pikmin wear colored macarons as hats.
  • Movie Theater Pikmin have Popcorn stuck to their heads.
  • Hamburger Shop Pikmin wear burgers or fries (Blue Pikmin wear soft drink cups.)
  • Café Decor Pikmin wear cups of coffee filled with coffee beans for outfits. The yellow and rock Pikmin even have whip cream on top of their heads.
• The Katy Perry's Sweet Treats stuff pack of The Sims 3 includes candy-themed clothes that are heavily based on her "California Gurls" video.
• Moshi Monsters: In the song "The Moshi Dance", Lady Goo Goo wears spaghetti as a hat.
• Team Fortress 2: The Fruit Shoot cosmetic is an apple that the Sniper can wear in place of his hat.
• Them's Fightin' Herds has a few such as a burger-themed hat, but some of the Pixel Lobby cosmetics are actual food items. A loaf of bread can be found and worn as a hat for the rest of the game early in the first chapter.

Webcomics

• Girl Genius: During a crash, Seffie ends up with a bunch of candy in her hair, which she then pretends is an intentional fashion statement. Then she realizes that this means she's going to have to go to the ball with a bunch of candy in her hair. Since all her friends follow suit so that she doesn't look like an idiot, she starts a major fashion trend, to her intense embarrassment.

Web Original

• Neopets: Several clothing and battledome (a play arena) accessories are made out of foods, such as jelly, chocolate, and candy.

Western Animation

• Adventure Time: Breakfast Princess, appropriately enough, wears clothing made of breakfast foods.
• Bob's Burgers: In "Art Crawl", when citing strange things their Aunt Gayle has done, the kids mention that she once wore a dress made of cocktail shrimp to church.
• The Casagrandes:
  • In "Flee Market", Bobby, while on a date with Lori celebrating the anniversary of the first time they ate pizza together, wears a pizza-themed tuxedo that has pepperoni for buttons.
  • In "Trend Game", one of the nonsensical trends Carlota teaches Ronnie Anne is wearing bracelets made of churros.
• The Cookie Carnival: The gingerbread cookie concocts a wonderful dress for the poor cookie girl out of colored frosting, candy hearts, and cupcake wrappers, using a powdered marshmallow as a makeup applicator, a candy heart as lipstick, and a shiny flat lollipop as a mirror.
• Littlest Pet Shop (2012): In "Topped with Buttercream", the sugar-addicted pets make tribal costumes out of candy.
• The Loud House: In "Community Disservice", Lola gets awarded a crown made of garlic bread.
• The Oblongs:
  • In "Bucketheads", when Milo tries to make his own line of clothes, he has Helga wear a dress made of bacon. Naturally, Helga can't stop herself from eating it, resulting in her dress falling off in front of the Hill kids, much to their disgust.
    Jared Climber: Someone poke my eyes out!
  • If foods eaten by other animals count, in the same episode, Milo also makes Peggy wear a dress made from eucalyptus leaves, which gets her attacked by a koala that some Australian guy brought to the fashion show for some reason.
• South Park: The costume for Bradly Biggle's superhero alter ego, Mintberry Crunch, consists of half of a berry mask some mint leaves, and a few berries on one half of his body.
• Winx Club: One episode had Stella wearing a dress made of vegetables to spread awareness on cleaning a beach. Cue Kiko running up to try and eat it.

Real Life

• Josephine Baker became a sensation in Paris when she wore a skirt made of rubber bananas, at an African-themed theatrical performance, and the banana skirt has been paid homage by black artists like Diana Ross and Beyoncé.
• Overlapping with Garden Garment, from the 1930s, a dress made of grapefruit peels◊, in celebration of Rio Grande Delta's harvest season.
• Carmen Miranda popularized the fruit hat, to the point where anyone with a bowl of fruit or bananas on their head is a stock shout-out.
• The meat dress worn by Lady Gaga at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards. She wore it in protest against the US military's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy, but drew ire from PETA.
• Dolly Varden cakes. Basically a doll is placed atop a cone-shaped cake to resemble a ballgown.

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