Aesthetic Consumption: How Brands Are Selling the Look Instead of the Thing

Today’s post comes from Courtney Mota, a member of our Future of Consumer & Culture team.

Tomatoes are having a moment and it’s not even late summer. But that’s ok because the moment they’re having isn’t an edible one. First came the obsession with the Loewe tomato candle that turned into an obsession with the tomato clutch. Now, an actual chair, upholstered in red, shaped to evoke the pucker of an heirloom tomato, is sitting in a gallery surrounded by people who came to look at it. Nobody was ever going to eat these tomatoes. And that was the whole point.

The tomato chair landed in a year when American food and beverage consumption is being quietly rewritten by a class of drugs. GLP-1 prescriptions have moved from diabetes management to mainstream weight loss, with millions of Americans now on Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, or Zepbound, and the prescription base growing every quarter. Alcohol participation is fragmenting. Sugar is in retreat. This pivot from physical ingestion to visual indulgence is a natural evolution of what we’ve been tracking in Horizon’s Injecting Change series. As GLP-1s and a broader cultural shift toward disciplined wellness reduce our physical appetites, our baseline craving for sensory indulgence hasn’t disappeared, it has simply found a new, aesthetic outlet.

Butter yellow is the it color. Tomato red is everywhere from interiors to handbags to nail polish. Gourmand fragrances (vanilla, caramel, brown sugar, espresso) dominate the perfume category. Food styling shows up in fashion campaigns that have nothing to do with food. The body is getting smaller and the visual world is getting more delicious.

This isn’t a contradiction; it’s a substitution. The experience of consumption is migrating from the body to the eye. The sensation is moving from the act to the aesthetic.

These aren’t passing pop-culture fads. They’re surface expressions of something deeper. As we argue in our Subculture Field Guide, aesthetic patterns are never the thing itself. They’re signals of a worldview, a set of values, a way of being in the world that a community has chosen to make legible through what it consumes, wears, and surrounds itself with. The question worth asking isn’t what the tomato chair is. It’s what the tomato chair means.

What the Tomato Actually Means

Tomato aesthetics aren’t really about tomatoes. They’re about everything tomatoes have come to represent for a specific cohort of consumers right now, and that cluster of meanings is doing more cultural work than the produce itself.

A tomato candle, an heirloom tomato chair, a tomato-printed dress all reference a particular idea of food that is the opposite of how most Americans actually eat. Not industrial. Not shelf-stable. Not on screens. The tomato in this visual language is always heirloom, always seasonal, always a little ugly, always implied to have come from somewhere specific. It’s a worldview compressed into a fruit.

Values Embedded in the Tomato

Slow time. The tomato signals a relationship with food that takes patience. You grow it, you wait for it, you eat it at the right moment or you miss it. In a culture optimized for speed and efficiency, an aesthetic anchored in seasonal patience signals access to time the rest of us don’t have.

Place. Heirloom produce implies terroir. It signals connection to a specific somewhere in a world where most of what we consume comes from nowhere in particular. The Loewe tomato is a Mediterranean tomato. The candle is a summer kitchen in Sicily.

Agrarian fantasy. Heirloom, by definition, predates industrial agriculture. The visual language is a quiet rejection of the food system that produced the bodies GLP-1s are now reshaping. The aesthetics are critiquing the conditions that created the demand for the drug. GLP-1s and the aesthetic are responding to the same underlying problem, the drug medically, the trend culturally.

Embodied sensory experience. In a culture where most of life is navigated through screens, a tactile, sensory, visceral object like a tomato (or a purse that represents one) is decidedly un-digital. It’s something you can touch, hold, smell, sit on. The screen can only show you a tomato.

This is why the trend won’t recede when butter yellow goes out of season. The aesthetic isn’t decorative. It’s the visible part of a deeper change in what people want food to mean to them, and the brands that understand which values they’re activating will outlast the ones that just chase the aesthetics.

Sensation Without Substance

When a category of consumption gets restricted, whether by a drug, a regulation, a health concern, or a cultural shift, the demand for the sensation of that consumption doesn’t disappear. It migrates. The candle replaces the kitchen. The print on the dress replaces the meal. The non-alcoholic aperitif replaces the cocktail but keeps the ritual, the glassware, the golden hour, the clink.

This is why butter yellow is having a moment in a year when butter consumption is flat. It’s why tomato-shaped objects are luxury signifiers in a year when produce inflation is a household conversation. It’s why a $48 candle that smells like an heirloom tomato outsells the actual heirloom tomato at the farmers market down the street.

A handful of smart brands are already fluent in this new visual language:

Rhode turned skincare into a food translation engine. Peptide lip treatments named Sweet Pea and Pretzel. A phone case shaped like the lip case so you can carry the gloss on your phone. The brand isn’t selling lip care. It’s selling the visual and tactile memory of food, worn on the mouth, mounted on the device, posted to the feed. You don’t eat the pretzel. You wear it. Lips are the threshold between outward beauty and inward consumption, which is why Rhode’s food-to-lip translation lands harder than the same move would in eyeshadow or fragrance.

Values activated: Embodied sensory experience.

Graza sells olive oil in a bright green squeeze bottle that visually quotes a sport drink. The product is a kitchen staple. The brand is the performance of cooking. Drizzling, finishing, abundance, the green stream against a white plate. Graza didn’t reinvent olive oil. It reinvented the gesture of using it, and the gesture is what the customer is paying the premium for.

Values activated: Slow time and place.

Olipop built a billion-dollar prebiotic soda business on a packaging system that quotes 1990s Crush, Fanta, and Sunkist with surgical precision. The can is the ad. The customer drinks the visual memory of childhood soda while consuming a fiber supplement. Aesthetic consumption with a functional alibi.

Values activated: Childhood nostalgia. Olipop is the outlier in this set, drawing from a different values: nostalgia for the industrial childhood food the wellness conversation now says is bad.

Ghia sells a non-alcoholic aperitif in a bottle that belongs on a Sicilian terrace at golden hour. The campaigns are people clinking glasses, laughing, leaning in. The product is the ritual, the bitter, the gesture, the implied evening. The alcohol was never the point of the aperitivo. Ghia figured out that the idea of the aperitivo was the point, and you can sell that without the alcohol if you sell it visually enough.

Values Activated: Place and slow time.

The pattern across all four: the brand offers a sensory experience that stands in for a thing the consumer wants but is restraining from. Alcohol. Sugar. Carbs. Childhood. Indulgence.

Why This Is Structural, Not A Fad

Aesthetic consumption isn’t going to peak with butter yellow and recede. The conditions creating it are getting more entrenched, not less.

GLP-1 adoption is climbing and the drugs are getting cheaper, more accessible, and more normalized. As more Americans consume less by prescription, the cultural appetite for the visual language of consumption will keep growing. The non-alcoholic category is following the same curve, with sober-curious behavior moving from a wellness niche to a default mode for a meaningful share of Gen Z and millennial drinkers. Sugar will follow. Ultra-processed food will follow.

What This Means for Media

But the implications here are even bigger for media than they are for CPG, and it’s a conversation that isn’t happening nearly enough. Because when a brand is selling sensation, the media environment around it stops being a backdrop and becomes part of the product itself.

The same Ghia creative inside a food publication sells the romance of the ritual. Placed inside a wellness newsletter, that same creative collapses back into the frame of abstinence – the very thing the brand is trying to transcend. Same creative, opposite meaning.

Food is the most intimate category. An audience trusts food-adjacent content in a way they simply don’t trust other media. A brand that earns its place there doesn’t just borrow attention, it borrows warmth. So, how should brands act?

First, stop planning for demographics and start planning for feeling. The old question was, “Where does our audience live?” The new, better question is, “Where does our audience feel the way our brand should make them feel?” For a non-alc brand, the answer isn’t a ‘wellness’ audience; it’s a dinner party, a recipe, a restaurant review. The halo is in the sensory context, not the user profile.

Second, treat media as an experience, not just exposure. Loewe’s tomato cafe in Milan likely generated more true brand value than an equivalent spend on programmatic ads because the activation was the message. This means prioritizing physical moments, art partnerships, and the kind of PR that creates an atmosphere, not just impressions. In a world of aesthetic consumption, scarcity is a feature, not a bug. Seeing a tomato candle on every checkout counter makes it feel cheap. Seeing it once, in the perfect context, makes it feel like a discovery.

This makes the job of media planning different now. It’s no longer a game of reach and frequency; it’s a discipline of art direction. The brief for a media partner should be as specific about the surrounding sensibility as a creative brief is about a color palette. What else is on the page? What is the visual tone of the environment? What time of day will this be seen?

The smartest brands are already figuring out they’re not buying impressions, they’re buying atmosphere. The media plan starts to look less like a reach-and-frequency curve and more like an art direction brief.

The New Appetite

The appetite changed direction, moving from the plate to the eye. And sensation without substance is the new menu.