It’s Not Just a Bag, It’s a Fendi Baguette: A History of Fendi’s Famous Bag
LONDON — “This isn’t a bag, it’s a Baguette,” Carrie Bradshaw pleads to her robber in Season Three of “Sex and the City,” which has recently been revived for Netflix and being discovered by a whole new generation — mainly Gen Z.
The Fendi bag in question in most of the series is the Baguette that was first introduced by Silvia Venturini Fendi in 1997 inspired by Parisian women carrying their baguette breads under their arms.
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The Baguette is Bradshaw’s bread and butter in the hit HBO series. When she has an opportunity to buy her apartment, she comes to the conclusion that she’s going to be “homeless. I’ll be a bag lady. A Fendi bag lady, but a bag lady.”
In the bag’s 27-year history, it has gone onto cementing itself as a signature accessory of the Italian luxury brand, driving a lucrative business and selling more than a million bags since its inception.
Fendi was the first luxury brand to loan “Sex and the City” its pieces which then opened doors for more brands to come into the show after proving to be so popular.
Like any trend, the Baguette bag’s popularity trickled down to the counterfeit market and was temporarily discontinued for its waning popularity.
In 2014, Fendi launched the My Baguette app, allowing fans of the bag to customize their own version with Venturini Fendi choosing a winner for Baguette of the Month.
The Rome-based luxury company relaunched the bag for spring 2019, hinging on the concept of friendship — with one special cameo by Sarah Jessica Parker.
“The Baguette never really went away and in time it has become a classic,” Venturini Fendi told WWD in an interview at the time, adding that younger customers had also started to buy the Baguette.
“All that history is very attractive to them, and this style has expressed a series of concepts, it epitomizes the manifesto of individuality,” she said.
The Baguette was fine-tuned for its relaunch with new textures and colorways, but still kept the minimal silhouette and inverted FF logo.
Fendi’s current artistic director Kim Jones celebrated 25 years of the bag with a special show during New York Fashion Week dedicated to the “It” bag, as well as working with his lifelong fashion hero and former Louis Vuitton boss Marc Jacobs.
Jacobs created a collection within the collection, using his love of logomania to play with the Fendi moniker on Baguettes.
Jones also teamed with iconic New York jeweler Tiffany & Co., now part of the LVMH Mo?t Hennessy Louis Vuitton brand family, on Tiffany blue Baguettes with silver charms, and a handmade solid sterling silver Baguette resembling a piece of jewelry itself, for the ultimate collector’s item.
“It’s been really exciting to see how a bag can be transformed into a collection. It was one of the first bags that was embroidered but meant to be worn during daytime, so we liked the idea of having a mix of embroidery and sequins and sweatshirts,” Venturini Fendi told WWD in 2022.
New iterations of the Baguette during the show included a multipocketed version souped up for today’s gadget hounds.
“You have a place for your airpods, your toothpicks, your asthma inhaler, it’s good for guys and girls, and it can also be a bum Baguette,” Jones added.
Searches for the bag skyrocketed in 2023 after the release of “And Just Like That,” the sequel to “Sex and the City.”
According to a study commissioned by Boohoo at the time, Pinterest searches for the style exploded following the show’s second season premiere, going up by 170 percent.
Launch Gallery: A History of the Fendi Baguette
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