By Amanda Giroux

Fashion: clothes, hair, makeup, accessories, beauty care.

Are these categories what you think of when the idea of fashion comes to your mind? Do you think of tall models in head-to-toe glitzy attire strutting down runways wearing luxury clothing lines? Or do you think of people in everyday life wearing streetwear such as jeans, t-shirts, and sneakers? And where do you associate fashion coming from? High-end brands like Gucci, Louis Vuitton, or Chanel? Everyday wear clothing stores like Nike, Levi’s, or Urban Outfitters? 

Have you ever associated fashion with not-so-tasty chain restaurants, possibly beloved or hated childhood TV Muppet characters, or snacks that mom and dad always refused to buy? If not, everything you have associated with fashion up to this point is wrong. Welcome to the new world of fashion, where brands take merchandise to a whole new level.

Athleisure is a trend that has grown in popularity in recent years. Unlike the trendy, modern, and fun clothing style of athleisure, there is the boring, average-tasting and always affordable Pizza Hut. Some of the easiest food to serve when catering to a large group of people are pizza pies. You are doing an injustice to fashion if you have never thought about styling yourself with a combination of pizza take-out boxes and tracksuits. If you eat it, why can’t you wear it? Pizza Hut launched a new collection of streetwear in the summer of 2021 called Pizza Hut Tastewear offering tracksuits, slides, and gold chains (pictured above). So, why wouldn’t you want to feel like a giant dufus in a checkered tracksuit? The art of color matching is unnecessary when you can be spotted in the monochromatic red slides and red tracksuit from Pizza Hut Tastewear.

Adidas is a well-known athletic apparel brand. Their famous three stripes logo is widely recognized on sneakers, but these sneakers have been without purpose until the 2008 Kermit the Frog collaboration. His deep yet nasally voice wasn’t enough public attention as a The Muppets Puppet; being stamped on a sneaker for consumers to wear and enjoy is the type of acknowledgment Kermit the Frog, and fashion itself, deserves.

There is no such a thing as feeling guilty for eating junk food when you could instead decorate yourself in it. In 2019, a.k.a. the year that everyone and their mother began releasing makeup lines, the Cheetos snack brand collaborated with Forever 21 to produce a makeup line based on their Flamin’ Hot Cheetos snack flavor. They sold items such as eyeshadow palettes, highlighters, and bronzer (pictured above). Now you no longer have to be jealous of bright orange traffic cones because you can look just like one thanks to Cheetos! Obviously, orange is a color that suits everyone and now everyone has the chance to “shine like the sun” in Cheetos Flamin’ Hot makeup.

Many people take careful consideration into what they put in and on their bodies. All that care and consideration can go out the window though with the new Oscar Mayer bologna-shaped face mask! Oscar Meyer has only the highest quality deli meats, so their face masks certainly should have the highest quality ingredients for you and your skin. This Freddy Krueger-looking mask encapsulates the highest quality of skin care unlike any company has done before. 

All these new brand collaborations display the epitome of fashion.

Fashion trends are always shifting, and these brands may very well be nothing without their modern collaborations. The food products from some of these brands just aren’t enough for the companies to sell, and so creating clothing, makeup, or skincare lines is the type of creativity their company needs to be successful. Their creativity is just what fashion in this century was lacking. It is the brand’s world, and we’re just living in it. If that means bologna for bright skin, and Cheetos for chiseled cheekbones then so be it.