Fendi’s Baguette Anniversary Show In New York

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of its iconic Baguette bag, Silvia Venturini Fendi and Kim Jones headed to New York to present Fendi’s Resort 2023 collection. Below, British Vogue fashion critic Anders Christian Madsen reports everything you need to know.

At 25, Fendi’s Baguette is a New York icon

It was in the year 2000, only three years after its birth, that Carrie Bradshaw – having lost her way somewhere south of Houston Street – corrected a mugger who, at gunpoint, told her to give him her bag. “It’s a Baguette,” she said. Twenty-five years on, in the Hammerstein Ballroom, not far from the scene of the crime that helped cement its icon status, Silvia Venturini Fendi threw a birthday party for the now-eternal It-bag she designed in 1997. A fashion institution in its own right, the Baguette also cemented Venturini’s own position. She wasn’t only the heir to the Fendi dynasty, but a bankable design talent in her own right. The one-off show put on alongside Kim Jones and their illustrious collaborators in New York this season was testament to the creative ecosystem she nurtures as the custodian of Fendi today.

Fendi collaborated with Marc Jacobs, Tiffany & Co. and Porter

“I am amazed how this bag is so inspirational and its transformation, from beaded to sporty, its attitude, has informed a whole collection and show,” Venturini said. To celebrate the Baguette, she and Jones invited fellow LVMH-owned Marc Jacobs and Tiffany & Co. to interpret the bag through their lenses, along with the capsule collection of ready-to-wear that complemented the bags on the runway. Tiffany sprinkled its diamonds over double-F logos adorned on Baguettes, while Jacobs’s contributions echoed the graphic logo-emblazoned collections he has recently been showing for his own brand, only with Fendi spelled out instead of his own name. Finally, the show included the ongoing collaboration with the Japanese brand Porter.

It cemented the Baguette’s special place in fashion

With a front row that naturally included Sarah Jessica Parker as well as Grace Jones, Kim Kardashian and Kate Moss, it was a birthday party guest list fit for an icon. Asked when she first realised the Baguette had a star quality different to other bags, Venturini recalled a party she went to at a friend’s house. “So many of the women there were wearing the bags. One had a phone inside and someone said, ‘The Baguette is ringing.’ I think that’s when I knew it had crossed over into something else, that the Baguette was beyond being just a bag.” As illustrated on the Fendi runway, today the Baguette is no longer for women only, but has transitioned into a number of interpretations in Venturini’s men’s collections.

Linda Evangelista made an appearance

Because there’s no great party without a special surprise, Linda Evangelista – who recently returned to modelling with a British Vogue cover and a Fendi campaign – made an appearance in a majestic turquoise cape as Venturini, Jones, Jacobs and Delfina Delettrez took their bows. If there was symbolism to be found in Evangelista’s presence, it was in the icon status, continuity and timeless she shares with the Baguette. “I want the bag to be worn by a new generation and to have a more diverse attitude,” Venturini said. “’She is now detachable and wearable in different ways: a chameleonic item, yet she always keeps her personality.”

The Baguette is forever

As for the Baguette’s future? “This bag will stay forever at Fendi. I am so interested in how Kim interprets the bag,” Venturini said. “It makes me think it will be immortal and ‘she’ will never lose her identity – you cannot detract from what she is and one is not more interesting than the other.”