“I couldn’t believe it. 15 years in New York and just when the city was getting safe, I was getting mugged. These guys weren’t just after money anymore… They were after fashion,” said Carrie Bradshaw in episode 17 of season 3 in Sex and the City (aired in 2000), while calmly handing over a purple sequined Fendi Baguette, first introduced in Autumn/Winter 1999-2000, after, of course, assuring the mugger that this was, in fact, not just a bag. Fast forward two decades, and the same purple sequins are still doing rounds in And Just Like That… And because this is Carrie Bradshaw, when young women come running after her yelling ‘I need that bag,’ the only socially acceptable response, as history insists, remains: ‘Oh, this isn’t a bag. It’s a Baguette.’
The Fendi Baguette first arrived in 1997, courtesy of Silvia Venturini Fendi, designed to carry little more than the essentials and dressed in enough sequins, beads and prints to be spotted from across the street. It spent the late 1990s and early 2000s as the it-bag, the 2010s as a prized vintage find, and the 2020s as yet another beneficiary of fashion’s inability to let the Y2K era rest in peace, thanks to a never-ending stream of re-editions. And it owes most of that to Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw. Or, more accurately, to Patricia Field, the costume designer behind the series and the woman responsible for four closets that launched a thousand shopping addictions.
But before Parker reunited with a beaded bag, Maria Grazia Chiuri did with Fendi. The designer returned to the brand after 37 years, and with her debut “Less I, More Us” came the Baguette’s original silhouette and style code, 26424. For their latest campaign, the house tapped photographer Bibi Borthwick, who shot Parker along with Jessica Alba, Emma D’Arcy, Bang Chan, MINA, Sophie Thatcher, Iris Law, Tecla Insolia, Song Yuqi, and Ren Meguro. There really is a Fendi Baguette for everyone.
