How Monte's turned a 120-year sauce recipe into a streetwear story

Monte's Fine Foods, the Italian-American pantry brand best known in the US for a 120-year-old family tomato sauce recipe, is making its most deliberate move yet into fashion, wagering that a jar of sauce and a sun-faded sweatshirt can trade on the same feeling.

The brand launched Pasta Beach, a limited-edition capsule pairing hand-printed apparel and accessories with three new artisanal pasta shapes — Stella, Bozzolo and Conchiglia. The apparel, developed with designers Sean Kinney and Eddie Eddie by Billy Tommy, is printed on upcycled vintage blanks sourced through American Wasteland, so no two pieces are alike. Sweatshirts, T-shirts, hats and totes are selling direct through Monte's site and at select premium retailers.

For a company that has reached more than 1,200 doors — Target, Whole Foods and Erewhon among them — since its 2019 founding, the collection reads like a statement of where the brand is headed.

"Monte's has always been a lifestyle brand," said founder and chief executive PJ Monte, who is wary of the phrase even as he uses it. "I actually hate the term 'lifestyle brand' because I think way too many companies use it as a marketing slogan, but Monte's truly epitomizes it."

The food-fashion crossover is now crowded, but Monte argues he arrived early. The brand has collaborated with Noah NY, Staud, Bloomingdale's and Eddie Eddie by Billy Tommy in the past.

"I grew up stirring sauce, then later in life making what, in retrospect, was some pretty cringe streetwear, only to come full circle and do both," he told FashionUntied, describing a teenage apparel line that showed at Las Vegas trade shows before he went back into the family food business. His shorthand for the whole enterprise: "Comfortably old, refreshingly new."

Pasta Beach is presented as a blend of the Amalfi Coast and the "Bronx Riviera," the stretch around Orchard Beach where Monte settled after childhood summers in Montauk and family roots near Naples. "We wanted to create something that feels like a memory of summers spent by the water, whether that's in Italy or right here in New York," he said. "Pasta Beach is our way of translating that effortless, nostalgic warmth into both what you wear and what you eat."

The decision to print on secondhand garments carries both a cost and a message. "We live in a world of fast fashion, artificial food and massive waste," Monte said. "There was no reason to buy brand-new blanks just to print our message on them when we could give a second life to well-made, broken-in garments that might otherwise end up in a landfill." He ties the upcycling to the food side — Monte's tomatoes are grown regeneratively in California — and to upbringing: "I was raised with an Italian-American immigrant mentality where we were taught to waste nothing."

Asked what comes next — another season, new categories, a bigger fashion play — Monte was unbothered by the "if." "I don't really believe it's a question of whether this lands, we've landed," he said. "We have some very exciting tricks up our sleeve. Stay tuned."