Implicit in a statement like Clemens’ is that collaborations of this nature have traditionally been appropriative, relying on a power dynamic bifurcated neatly between the affluent and the destitute. By this same token, the patrons fast food companies tend to attract get imagined, usually, as poor and fat (even if that image clashes with the truth of who eats fast food, which, as a study concluded by the Ohio State University’s Center for Human Resource Research last May, skews middle class). These companies, more often than not, want to generate publicity for their food through their merch, appealing to demographics they want to woo back to their restaurants, demographics who may have the monetary luxury of pursuing more healthful options.

Fast food and (fast) fashion have been hopping into bed with each other everywhere I look, from Forever 21 x Taco Bell to Kith x Coca Cola. It’s a fitting union; fast food and fast fashion hew to similarly frenetic production cycles, with an emphasis on speed that presupposes a guarantee of consumption. Shared, too, is a sense of opacity, an erasure of labor in both fast food and fast fashion; what matters above all else is the pleasure of the recipient of that labor transaction.

What’s driving this desire for fast food companies to align themselves with fashion brands? My mind returns, somewhat cynically, to the fact that voluntarily eating fast food has become a form of social currency for the rich, a fashion statement in itself for anyone who occupies a social position higher than working class. It feeds the fantasy that food can bring us together, serving as the great democratizing equalizer within a capitalist structure, uniting consumers across social strata and fooling people into believing that everyone’s diets, divorced from capital, are the same. There are few financial barriers restricting access to fast food; it is food’s lowest common denominator. The reality is that this mobility doesn’t operate in the reverse. Not everyone has the luxury of reaching into low culture and tasting from it.

Visual motifs from fast food chains have been creeping onto runways for years: Jeremy Scott devoted his entire F/W06 collection to fast food. Sweatshirts bore frowning French fry boxes, while dresses were covered in cubist fries. He’d build on this when he got to Moschino in February 2014, repurposing McDonald's golden arches for a logo on a sweater and a handbag. Such visual gestures can be pleasantly ironic, gut-busting foodstuffs draped over the kinds of bodies you can achieve only with a punishing exercise routine. Marc Jacobs, in 2013, borrowed the iconography of the Coca Cola logo and recreated it with a single, wavy white crest made with sequins. Then he partnered with Diet Coke to design limited-edition bottles lined with dots and birds.