Fulvio Bonavia’s Delicious Accessories

Italian photographer Fulvio Bonavia builds fashion accessories that would spoil in a drawer. Corn becomes espadrilles. Aubergines turn into slippers. Tagliatelle cinches a waist as a belt that should, the joke goes, be worn al dente. In the book and photo series often called A Matter of Taste, food is not a prop beside a model—it is the garment itself, lit and styled as if it belonged on a runway rather than a plate.

The work sits at a familiar intersection: haute couture’s appetite for novelty, and food photography’s appetite for surface. Bonavia’s contribution is to make that overlap look inevitable. A blueberry bag reads as both clutch and harvest. A cheese necklace looks like jewelry until you notice the rind. Pasta bracelets catch studio light the way lacquered wood might. The pictures are playful without becoming cartoons; they keep the cool distance of editorial fashion even when the materials are perishable.

From graphic design to edible couture

Bonavia’s path helps explain the control in these frames. Born in Italy, he worked first as a graphic designer and illustrator—including film-poster work—before committing fully to photography. That background shows in how each accessory is composed: silhouette first, then texture, then the small details that sell the fiction of wearability. He is known for handling his own post-production, so the image stays under one sensibility from set to final file. Nothing feels outsourced into a different visual language halfway through.

Advertising and editorial clients later valued that inventiveness—the ability to fuse nature and design without losing either. In A Matter of Taste, the fusion is literal. Fruits, vegetables, pasta, and confectionery are arranged into handbags, hats, headphones, shoes, rings, and earrings. Accompanying text by New Zealand food writer Peta Mathias framed the photographs as a season of edible fashion: step out in corn espadrilles; dine later on fruit-paste bangles; never go hungry, or naked, again. The humor is dry. The craft is serious.

Why food works as fashion language

Fashion photography already borrows from appetite. Gloss, drip, gloss again—lipstick and sauce share a vocabulary. Bonavia flips the metaphor. Instead of making clothes look delicious, he makes delicious things look like clothes. That reversal does several jobs at once. It flatters the produce: an aubergine becomes sculptural when shaped as footwear. It teases luxury: a berry purse looks expensive until you remember it would stain a coat. And it tests the viewer’s willingness to accept fiction. You know nobody will walk city streets in lettuce lingerie, yet the photograph still asks you to evaluate cut, balance, and color the way you would a real accessory line.

Color is one of the series’ quiet strengths. Food arrives with chroma that dyes and leathers must manufacture—the yellow of corn, the deep purple of eggplant skin, the irregular blues and reds of berries. Bonavia stages those colors against clean backgrounds so the accessory reads as a product shot. Shadows are controlled. Highlights pick out ridges of pasta or the wet shine of fruit. The result is closer to a lookbook than to a still-life of leftovers.

Construction, not collage

Part of the pleasure is believing the object was built, not merely pasted together in software. Bonavia constructs on set: food is shaped, stacked, wrapped, and lit until it holds the silhouette of a shoe or bag. Post-production finishes the illusion—edges cleaned, contrasts tuned, the last seam of disbelief sealed—but the photographs still carry evidence of physical arrangement. Pasta has weight. Cheese has a breakable edge. Corn kernels catch light individually. That tactility keeps the series from floating into pure digital whimsy.

Compare the approach with other food-art traditions. Landscape tables made of vegetables, or maps built from spices, often ask you to admire ingenuity from a distance. Bonavia’s accessories ask you to imagine touch and wear. Could a tagliatelle belt hold? Would aubergine slippers crease? The questions are absurd, which is the point. Absurdity is allowed when the styling remains disciplined. Without that discipline, edible fashion collapses into novelty meme. With it, the work joins a longer conversation about how commercial photography sells desire through materials that are not quite what they claim to be.

Accessories as the right scale

Choosing accessories rather than full garments was a shrewd scale. A shoe or clutch can be built from a manageable amount of food and still read as complete. A full suit of produce would tip toward costume or protest. Accessories also sit closer to jewelry and product design—categories already obsessed with finish. Headphones made of vegetables, a cap of greens, chocolate earrings swirled like boutique confectionery: each piece is small enough to inspect, large enough to surprise.

There is also a class joke embedded in the project. Fashion accessories signal taste, status, and seasonal belonging. Food accessories signal the same codes while reminding you that taste is also, literally, taste. The double meaning of the book’s English title does the rest. A matter of taste is aesthetic judgment and culinary preference at once. Bonavia photographs that pun until it stops needing explanation.

Reading the pictures as design

Look for three habits across the series. First, silhouette clarity: even before you identify the food, you recognize the category—shoe, bag, necklace. Second, material honesty: the food is not painted to look like leather; it remains recognizably itself, which makes the transformation funnier and sharper. Third, editorial restraint: faces and bodies, when present, serve the object; the accessory is the star. That hierarchy is how real fashion campaigns sell a bag. Bonavia borrows the hierarchy and swaps the inventory.

The series also rewards slow looking at seams and joins. Where does corn become sole? How does pasta wrap a waist without looking like a plate dropped on a model? Those transitions are where graphic-design thinking shows: edges, repetition, pattern, negative space. Illustration training helps too. A poster illustrator learns to make a single object carry a whole mood. These photographs do the same with a belt or a slipper.

Appetite, humor, and the shelf life of an idea

Edible couture cannot be stocked. That impossibility is part of the charm and part of the critique. Luxury fashion already sells fantasy objects; Bonavia simply makes the fantasy digestible and temporary. You cannot buy the blueberry clutch, which frees the image from retail obligation and lets it work as pure visual argument. At the same time, the photographs flatter the same desires a campaign would: novelty, craftsmanship, the wish to own something no one else has. The satire is gentle. Nobody is mocked. Appetite is.

In the years since the book circulated through design and lifestyle sites, similar projects have appeared—clothes made of food, wearable produce, dessert jewelry. Bonavia’s set remains distinctive because it refuses chaos. The humor never excuses messy lighting or lazy composition. Each accessory could hang in a gallery as a still-life even if you ignored the fashion premise. That dual readability—food study and fashion study—is why the delicious accessories keep their bite.

If you return to one image, choose the piece that most convincingly could hang in a shop window for five minutes before wilting. Ask what lighting and angle make perishable matter look permanent. That question is Bonavia’s craft in miniature: how to photograph desire when the product cannot last, and how to make taste—both kinds—look like design.