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What Happens When Chefs Design T-Shirts

If it's already one of those "Say YES CHEF and that's it" or "I don't SCREAM I express myself" sort of weeks, you're in luck. Flavour Gallery, the L.A. based T-shirt designer with an eye for dining-inspired designs, has expanded recently beyond its typical "swirl and sip" logos. The company began collaborating with a handful of chefs to design some pretty fantastic T-shirts.

We like to think of them as that rare multipurpose T-shirt for those "tricky" attire moments in life: The obligatory summer barbecue at your boss' house, the first time you meet your future in-laws. Yeah, Rick Tramonto's "Every chef needs a good acid trip" T-shirt (above) is pretty perfect for both.

That "Say YES CHEF and that's it" T-shirt? Three guesses which L.A. chef inspired that one (answer after the jump).

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Tom Trager

Because cookies, video clips and hilarious interviews aren't enough, there is now a Ron Swanson T-shirt. And it's spectacular. Designed by Tom Trager, it imagines everyone's favorite Parks & Recreation character as the star of a Dr. Seuss book. Only instead of sharing and caring and positive values, it promotes a very Swansonian worldview: Gimme all your bacon. It comes in a rainbow of colors and costs $24.54.

Miss Turkey in her custom-print hamburger bikini.

It's probably too late to purchase most of these gifts in time for Christmas, but that doesn't mean we can't sit and drool at the intersection of food and fashion. Sorry, Miss Turkey's custom-made burger bikini was auctioned off for charity months ago.

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Guzzle & Nosh

The Spare Room: George Esquivel bowling shoes (left), bowling lanes (right), punch (bottom).

The lovely lanes at The Spare Room, shined with the tears of incorporeal former starlets, are indeed functional. But when it comes to bowling at the Roosevelt's recondite cocktail haunt, it's harder to pick up a spare than it is to pick up a pair -- a pair of George Esquivel loafers.

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The Starbucks Siren logo next to the $85 Alexander Wang-designed "coffee stain" t-shirt.

Hot coffee became haute coffee as Starbucks debuted a line of high-fashion t-shirts designed by the likes of Sophie Theallet, Billy Reid and Alexander Wang. The ugliest of the shirts, which cost $85 apiece, is undoubtedly the Wang creation. The theoretically unisex shirt features "a coffee spill illusion of the iconic Starbucks Siren" i.e. an ugly brown splotch running down the left side of the shirt. Squint and you'll notice the Starbucks logo near the midriff.

Perhaps you prefer food-themed shirts that are a touch less self-important or at least ones that don't make you look like a victim of the coffee-ring effect. Here are five shirts from Tee Fury, our newest daily addiction. Sadly, these shirts are less accessible than the Starbucks high-fashion designer line. Tee Fury releases one shirt per day, and after that day, it's gone. We're told they never do reprints. Brilliant and evil, no?

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For today's fashion-food mash up, we present Drew Droege as a perfectly deadpan version of actress Chloë Sevigny in a series of videos aptly entitled, Chloe.

This Chloe predictably name drops art luminaries, party sponsors and all manner of fashion brands and high end designers. Not very different from her real world counter-part. What we love is that Droege's drag doppelganger also likes to share what she's been eating, by stringing together seemingly random food-related words that somehow make sense. Our favorite video is Toast, in which our slightly off-kilter hostess/spot-on imitation of the real Sevigny, discovers her own version of, well, toast, and shares a recipe.

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We were once dumb enough to ask about the Cleveland steamer, so "meat purse" just sounds to us like slang for something awful, but one budding designer is making the term a stylish reality. As an homage to Coco Chanel, Pasadena Art Center College of Design student Nancy Wu crafted an imitation of Chanel's famous 2.55 bag out of beef jerky. She even stamped the purse with a criss-cross pattern and included a chain handle interwoven with meat. It's not her only experiment with "meatcessorizing." Her line of savory handbags also includes a beef jerky Louis Vuitton wallet with the company's logo spray-painted onto the meat.

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In her November 22 Newsweek article "The Dinner Divide," Lisa Miller dissects the latest Barneys ad campaign, writing that "food is no longer trendy or fashionable," but instead simply "fashion." As evidence, she cites one ad for an $80,000 diamond pendant garnished with octopus tentacles.

Miller received the store's catalogue in the mail. In our case, every time we leave the house, we see the massive Barneys billboard on La Cienega featuring a pale model with what looks like a crown of chocolate ganache florets piled atop her head and a fat cherry tucked between her dark-red lips like an edible ball-gag. "Have a foodie holiday," reads the script in piped icing font.

Food is already a mighty dividing line in America. The richest Americans are getting richer; the poorest Americans are getting no less poor. Rich people buy $20 hunks of raw-milk cheese and talk about ramps; poor people eat frozen dinners, suffer from obesity, and die before they should. Thus, it's sort of grossly perfect that a high-end department store has seized upon the idea of pairing sex and impeccable produce to push luxury togs.

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First & Hope

Staff at First & Hope model their uniforms (L to R): A dining room assistant/runner uniform, a floor-length hostess gown, a bartender/server uniform, a cocktail server mini-dress, another bartender/server uniform, a server dress and a female bartender dress.

Remember when bagels were health food, fusion hadn't become shorthand for pan-ethnic unoriginality and we were all giddy with the possibility of cereal bars as meal replacements? The 1980s are long gone. So why are their bland, neutered waitstaff uniforms still with us?

Not that we're suggesting a return to the humiliating dirndls of yore (we have the Red Lion for that) or Emilio Pucci-designed pop-mod dresses and pillbox hats (if only). But somewhere between Hooters short-shorts and the standard black slacks, white shirt and black tie, it would be nice to see a waiter's uniform with a little panache.

Two new supper clubs, First & Hope and Tar Pit, have extended their edenic Jazz Era vibe to include the clothes their staff wear. In the process, they've raised the bar in the sedate world of waitstaff uniforms and demonstrated that sophisticated and functional are not mutually exclusive.

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