This year, Fendi celebrated the Baguette’s 25th anniversary with a special show during New York Fashion Week. It’s the first fashion show ever to be dedicated to a bag, or more accurately, a "Baguette" – as Carrie Bradshaw so earnestly corrects her assailant in the memorable Sex and the City mugging scene (in season’s three’s ‘What Goes Around Comes Around’, aired in 2000).
The Baguette (named after the similarly svelte French bread, also carried under-arm) made its first appearance in Fendi’s autumn/winter 1997 show. Conceived by Silvia Venturini Fendi – granddaughter of the house’s founders – under the artistic directorship of Karl Lagerfeld, the bag was a departure from the minimalist, oversized totes of the Nineties. Its diminutive size was a little impractical – decadently so – and it was developed in a magpie-pleasing assortment of finishes, from textured wool to intricate embellishments, inspired by the designer’s grandmother’s collection of 1920s and 1930s bags. And, front and centre, was Fendi’s interlocked FF ‘Zucca’ insignia – invented by Lagerfeld in 1965 and soon to become a beacon for Noughties logomaniacs.