Bread Bags is a project by artist Chloe Wise that mixes the world of fashion with food creating contemporary art in leather, painting, and urethane.
Despite her vast artistic production, Chloe Wise has become famous for a project that revolves around this world. Bread Bags is a set of sculptures that mix oil paint with materials such as leather and urethane, reinterpreting iconic models of bags in the form of food.
Pancakes, bagels, toasts, sandwiches, are worked down to the smallest of details becoming from simple good food to good fashion food.
The duality of the word consumption — defined as both an indulgence of food and a surplus of spending — was the starting point for Chloe Wise’s artistic interests. The Canadian-born, New York-based creative toys with themes of luxury and consumerism by recreating some of the fashion industry’s most emblematic merchandise with food.
Purses, backpacks, handbags and totes by the likes of Prada, Chanel and Louis Vuitton are reimagined in pancake, toast, bagel and bread form – gooey grilled cheese sandwich triangles make up the plush pattern of a Prada purse; silver dollar pancakes sticky with syrup stack up to make a Chanel shoulder bag; a whole loaf of poppy seed challah bread is imagined as a leather strapped backpack.
Cast in urethane and intricately painted with a hyper-realism that constitutes a trompe l’oeil effect, wise recontextualizes the pricey products as art objects instead of purchasable goods, where food and fashion are rid of their value and become solely symbolic of the frivolity of excess.
Although they look like real food bags, you can’t actually wear them not because of being made with real food, cause they don’t, but because they are art pieces. Made to make an impression.
