Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
The Moroccan lifestyle press is where I’ve decided to prepare for my upcoming trip to Marrakech, because I am a responsible adult who does his due diligence, and because I cannot read French or Arabic and MWN Lifestyle publishes in English. It is, I have learned over a week of scrolling, mostly articles about fashion weeks I will never attend, celebrities I do not recognize, and garlic bread. This last category has its own dedicated vertical, apparently, and I respect the commitment.
I was doing my homework, trying to learn what Moroccans are currently paying attention to so that I might have some cultural foothold when I land. Karie, freshly minted PhD and therefore now professionally obligated to recognize bad research methodology, walked through with a half-packed carry-on and asked what I was working on. I said I was researching Morocco. She said I was looking at my iPad. I said these were the same thing. She gave me the look she has been giving me for fifteen years, the one that says the author is sixty years old as of two days ago and has learned nothing, and continued onward.
Then an article stopped my planning cold. The headline was “KFC Brazil Turns Fried Chicken Texture Into Wearable Fashion.”
And I want to be very clear: I did not misread it.
The Article, Distilled for the Unbelieving
Here is what I learned, sitting on a Virginia farm, via a Moroccan lifestyle magazine, about an event that happened in Brazil. Three continents participated in the delivery of this information. The one I was sitting on contributed nothing.
KFC Brazil, working with the São Paulo creative agency Lola\TBWA, launched a limited run campaign called “Tailor Made Couture.” I will let that phrase sit there for a moment before continuing, because I suspect you need the same pause I did.
“Tailor Made Couture.”
For three days in late March, customers who purchased a medium bucket of fried chicken at KFC’s flagship drive-thru in São Bernardo do Campo were invited to hand over a piece of their personal clothing. An artisanal textile studio, Atelier by Amanda Lenzi, would then apply a specially engineered sherpa fabric to the garment. The fabric had been designed to visually resemble the crispy breading of KFC fried chicken. Three weeks later, the garment was returned to the customer.
By every available photograph, it truly looked like it had been battered and fried.
Eligible items included bucket hats, tote bags, coats, jackets, jeans, skirts, and waist bags. A “waist bag” is a fanny pack that has done some reading. As Roastbrief reported while covering the launch, the pieces were hand sewn through a process the agency itself described as more delicate and time consuming than producing a garment from scratch. This is not nothing. KFC Brazil spent more labor hours breading a single customer’s jean jacket than its kitchens spend breading an evening’s worth of actual chicken.
A selection of the finished garments was then displayed at São Paulo Design Week, because there is nothing a design week will refuse as long as it arrives with a press release and a backstory.
“Tailor Made Couture” is now a real phrase, attached to a real activation, worn by real human beings who voluntarily left a fast food restaurant with a jacket that appeared to have been dredged in flour. The campaign’s internal term for its target demographic, per the agency credits, was “KFC Lovers,” which is the kind of phrase I would like to unhear for the remainder of my sixtieth year.
The Colonel Is Screaming From Beyond the Grave
You need to understand that Harland Sanders, the actual man, would have hated this with a clarity that borders on the sacred.
Colonel Sanders sold his company in 1964, stayed on as a salaried brand ambassador, and then spent the rest of his life publicly describing what the new owners were doing to his food as if he were filing sworn depositions. In a 1975 interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal, preserved now in the text of an actual Kentucky Supreme Court decision, he described KFC’s gravy as wallpaper paste. He compared its crispy recipe, in the same interview, to a fried doughball stuck on some chicken. He called the mashed potatoes sludge. A Bowling Green franchisee sued him for libel over these remarks and lost, which means the Commonwealth of Kentucky has ruled, on the record, that the Colonel’s position was legally allowable commentary.
The Kottke archive preserves a specific scene from September 1976. Sanders walks into a Manhattan KFC with New York Times food critic Mimi Sheraton. He watches an employee mix boiling water into instant potato powder. He turns to that employee and says, “And then you have wallpaper paste.” He is eighty six years old. He is wearing the white suit. He is doing this on purpose.
This is the man whose image now decorates a Brazilian sherpa jean jacket meant to evoke the breading of a product he, while alive and unmedicated, called a doughball.
If there is an afterlife, he is not resting. He is, at minimum, screaming. At maximum, he is ascending through the ceilings of consecutive heavens specifically to locate the deity who permitted this and register a complaint in person, possibly while brandishing a wooden spoon.
This Is Not KFC’s First Fashion Offense
It is important to note, for the record, that KFC has been wandering into fashion for years, and the Brazilian couture is not a deviation but an escalation. In 2020, KFC partnered with Crocs on a pair of chicken-printed clogs with removable, chicken-scented drumstick charms that debuted at New York Fashion Week.
I want you to read that last sentence again. The charms smelled like fried chicken. They were not meant to be eaten, a fact the marketing copy found it necessary to state explicitly, which tells you something about the projected audience.
Taco Bell opened a pop-up hotel in Palm Springs in 2019 called the Bell, which booked out in two minutes. Pizza Hut has sold sneakers you could order pizza from, as though the natural evolution of a shoe was to become a phone (We see you Agent 99.) McDonald’s has released cologne, adult footie pajamas, and more merch drops than any sane human could track. Wendy’s has a diss-track rap album. This is the industry in which KFC Brazil’s sherpa jean jacket exists, and in that context it is not shocking. It is regionally competitive.
The difference is that the Brazilian version crossed the plane separating branded merch from actual couture. This was not a tote bag with a printed logo. It was a commissioned textile collaboration with a named artisanal atelier (My new favorite word! Gush!), modifying a customer’s personal garment through weeks of handwork, displayed at a design week. This was the move up the prestige ladder that fast food fashion had not yet attempted. And they did it in São Paulo, in Portuguese, which is a reliable way to keep a marketing story out of the American news cycle.
A Brief Aside, Because Someone Has to Say It
Popeyes would never. Popeyes has never done this and Popeyes will never do this, because Popeyes does not need to turn its chicken into outerwear. Popeyes understands that if the chicken is correct, the chicken is the campaign. I am not paid to say this (Although, I am open to listening to offers.). I am saying it because it is true, and because the Colonel, were he consulted, would agree, then he would curse for forty minutes, then he would ask where the bourbon was.
But Why Am I Reading This from Morocco?
Here is the question I cannot get past, the one that sent me down this particular hole, the one I will still be turning over on the plane. This campaign ran in Brazil, in late March, for three days. It was covered at the time, briefly, in a handful of marketing trade publications that nobody outside advertising reads voluntarily. It did not break into American mainstream media. I, a person who doomscrolls at a professional level, had never heard a syllable about it.
Then, three weeks later, it appeared in a Moroccan lifestyle magazine, in English, tagged under Fashion, sitting directly between articles about Moroccan Fashion Week and a sardine tagine recipe, bylined by a writer named Majda Bouzaroita whose other work I am now obligated to read. And I only encountered it because I happened to be traveling to Marrakech and have been trying to behave, for once, like an informed visitor.
American brand. Brazilian subsidiary. Moroccan lifestyle press. American reader in rural Virginia. The chain of custody on this story passes through four countries before it reaches me, and I am the node closest to the source.
What Is Actually Going On Here
What I realized, standing in our farmhouse with a suitcase open and Hector Queso Suarez, DDS (eleven pounds of chihuahua, licensed for all packing oversight) judging my sock choices from the pillow, is that this is how culture actually moves now, and has probably always moved. I have been operating under the comforting provincial illusion that American cultural products stay American.
It does not. It leaves. It gets adopted, refracted, localized, reinterpreted, and sometimes sold back. The version that comes home is not the version that left. And I will not be the one to notice, because I am not paying attention to the places it goes.
There is, I am confident, a Moroccan teenager in Casablanca right now who knows more about Brazilian fast food marketing than I do. She has seen images of the sherpa jean jacket. She has an opinion. She could, if asked, construct opinions about KFC’s global branding strategy that I could not begin to assemble on my own. She is not wrong to have them. She is paying attention to a global brand behaving globally. I am the one behaving provincially, sitting in Virginia and assuming that what happens in my country is the main show.
Next week I will be in Marrakech. I will walk through a souk, and I will almost certainly pass a kid in a T-shirt whose logo I recognize from my own country, and I will not know what that logo means to him, and he will know exactly what it means to me. The Colonel died in 1980 angry about gravy. I cannot imagine what he would say about the jacket. I cannot imagine what he would say about the fact that I learned about the jacket from a Moroccan fashion journalist whose byline he would not have been able to pronounce. I suspect, if I had to guess, that his reaction would involve the word “wallpaper” and that he would want, very much, to throw something.
Karie just walked through with my passport and asked if I was still researching. I said yes. She asked what I had learned. I told her that KFC Brazil had turned a jean jacket into a breaded jean jacket, that Moroccan lifestyle journalists had noticed, that the Colonel would have hated all of it, and that I was having some thoughts about the shape of the world. She said that sounded like a lot of thoughts for the price of a medium bucket.
She is not wrong. I zipped up the suitcase.
See my Amazon author page and buy my books.
His first manuscript was composed entirely of punctuation marks and confused sketches. He's since published "Not Bukowski" (poems that don't rhyme) and "Slop and Swell from a Festering Mind" (essays so concerning that bookstores check on his wellbeing). He once spent three hours photographing a rare bird that turned out to be a plastic bag, and he's the only person banned from church bake sales for "weaponized brownies." Inheriting absurdism from Vonnegut and Adams, sprawling narratives from Irving, and weaponized failure from Moore, he writes about conflicted everymen struggling through supernatural chaos.
He has two new, offbeat novels waiting foran agent or a publisher: "Truth Tastes Like Pennies" and "Elliot Nessie."
He remains unconvinced that birds aren't surveillance drones.
More biographic lies...err...info.
- Packing for Marrakech, Distracted by Fried Chicken Fashion - April 20, 2026
- I Am Not a Carwash Guy Either - April 17, 2026
- Scientists Confirm Sperm Whales Have Language. Gary is pleased. - April 16, 2026
