Fashion Is Making Clothes Out of Pasta.
Abercrombie & Fitch recently commissioned a pair of jeans made from pasta.
They are tiny, blue and much better than they need to be. The pockets are there. So are the waistband, seams and those little creases you get when denim has been sitting folded on a shop table. Someone online called them fettujeans, and there was really no improving on that.
The artist is Min Kyung-jin, who works as Sibatable. She has been turning food into improbable little objects for years: animals made from noodles and rice, miniature scenes, clothes, handbags. Victoria’s Secret, Coach and J.Crew have hired her too.
The jeans become funnier the closer you look. At some point she had to decide how a pasta waistband should sit. A pocket had to look like a pocket. A belt loop had to survive long enough to be photographed. None of this was necessary, which is precisely why it is so enjoyable.
Fashion has been developing an appetite for this kind of thing. Vogue recently called it “effort signaling”: work where you can plainly see that somebody spent time making it. Embroidery, clay animation, miniature sets, paper constructions and stop-motion have all been turning up in campaigns.
That sounds rather grand for a pair of noodle trousers, but the timing is good. We are not short of polished images. What still gets your attention is the suspicion that somebody spent an unreasonable afternoon making one tiny detail work.
Pasta improves the joke because it is such an uncooperative material. Silk drapes. Leather holds a shape. Pasta wants to become dinner. Yet there it is, pretending to be denim.
Anyone who cooks has probably fallen for some version of the same impulse. You fold tortellini one by one even though there are faster ways to eat pasta. You arrange the fruit on a tart. You braid a loaf. You make chocolate curls that disappear before anyone has properly admired them.
Sometimes the extra trouble is the whole pleasure.
Min has taken that instinct considerably further. Vogue previously asked her to recreate Spring 2026 runway looks in pasta, which sent Chanel, Dior, Gucci, Balenciaga and Loewe through the noodle machine. The pictures are ridiculous, but they reward inspection. A sleeve suddenly becomes a technical problem. A ruffle needs to be engineered from dough. You start out laughing and end up wondering how she pulled it off.
No wonder brands keep calling.
The Abercrombie video passed five million views, which feels about right for a pair of jeans nobody can wear and nobody asked for.
There are worse things for fashion to be doing than giving us a new word for dinner.
Fettujeans.
