Kim Jones and Marc Jacobs Celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the Legendary Fendi Baguette
BY LYNN YAEGER
PHOTOGRAPHY BY ANNIE LEIBOVITZ
September 8, 2022
“Give me your bag!” a robber yells to a startled Carrie Bradshaw in season three, episode 17 of Sex and the City. “It’s a Baguette!” Bradshaw cries out, and with that, millions of viewers understood in a flash what their heroine was saying: This wasn’t a mere purse—it was something far more important, far more beloved.
In the words of Silvia Fendi, the Baguette’s redoubtable creator, that truncated, short-handled, often highly embellished envelope has “its own personality and its own identity—it’s a little sexy bag!” Fendi dreamed up this icon a quarter of a century ago, and now the house is pulling out all the stops with a series of tributes that began during New York Fashion Week—because if the Baguette first saw the light of day in Rome, it came of age and had its early triumphs in Manhattan.
Kim Jones, Fendi’s artistic director of womenswear, not only decided to show a special collection in New York—to make things even more exciting, he invited his friend Marc Jacobs, who he refers to reverently as the King of American Fashion, to present a small collection honoring both the Baguette and Fendi itself on that same runway. “Marc is one of my heroes, the reason I am here,” Jones says, and indeed, years ago Jacobs hired Jones to do the menswear at Louis Vuitton.
Fendi is also issuing special Baguettes for the occasion, and the eminent Tiffany & Co. is also getting into the act, offering some stellar interpretations—a sterling edition! A gem-studded version! Even the spiritual godmother of the bag, Sarah Jessica Parker herself, is contributing a Baguette she has helped design.
These creative conversations reflect a fashion industry that couldn’t be more different than the one that existed when the Baguette arrived in the 1990s—and if that decade lives in your mind as a long-lost paradise (and you can feel that way even if you were not alive then), certain fashion phenomena that we now take for granted could never have been imagined back then. Consider alliances and cross-pollinations like Balenciaga and Adidas, Gucci and The North Face—and, of course, Fendi’s historic collaboration with Versace in September 2021, which has come to be known cheekily as Fendace. As for inviting an American designer to share the runway of an esteemed Italian house that was mounting a show in New York City? Dream on.
Which is not to say that the 1990s didn’t have their own special power. The Baguette arrived at a moment in fashion when the divisions between uptown and down were collapsing, when you could be a file clerk by day and a fashion star by night. The ability to defy conventional wisdom—to gain admittance to the swankiest venue just because you looked like you belong there—made the appeal of a glittering New York City life irresistible to people both around the country and around the world. And more than any single cultural phenomenon, Sex and the City crystallized this fantasy: endless cocktails with your three best pals! Gay proms in the Meatpacking District! Lying on a big bed at a five-star hotel clad in a stupendous Versace Mille Feuille dress, getting ready to trade one suitor—a narcissistic artist—for the formerly infuriatingly unattainable Mr. Big, cut down to size at last. And all of these fantastical goings-on were taking place with a Baguette hanging from your shoulder—even if you were young, and broke, and lived hundreds of miles from a Fendi store, and your bag was purely imaginary.
“At first I wondered, Can I work outside of my comfort zone?” Jacobs says. “But finally I decided to stop overanalyzing it and just have fun with it”
“It came at the right moment, when everyone was wearing a minimal backpack—I wanted something that would break the rules,” Silvia Fendi explains, likening the bag to a delicious addictive treat: “They are so appealing you almost want to eat them—you want a chocolate one, and then a cream one, then a strawberry one!”
Jones describes the Baguette as “one of the pillars of the house. It became very famous—it was the It bag and the symbol of New York. I’ve always loved the vibe and energy of the city, the beauty in the way it regenerates itself,” he explains. The 1990s were a special time for Jones and his nascent Manhattan adventures. He was still underage—he had a fake ID to get into clubs like the Pyramid in the East Village—and was fascinated by “the excitement of New York” and the mix of uptown and downtown. “You would see a gallerist next to a skateboarder,” he says. “I still have every flyer from those days!”
For his homage to New York, Jones has created a collection that, he confesses, is quite different from those he shows in Italy. There is a streetwise wisdom to these New York clothes—sleeveless tees and black-sequined windbreakers—and you cannot help but notice more than a smattering of that particular shade somewhere between sky and aqua, known universally as Tiffany Blue, showing up in everything from a gauzy asymmetrical skirt to a sleek jumpsuit. Jones smiles. “Well, the Tiffany flagship in New York is near the Fendi flagship. They are blue, and Fendi is yellow, so there’s a synergy.”
Believe it or not, Jacobs wasn’t at all sure he wanted to be a part of this lollapalooza when Jones approached him—as it turns out, he’s actually much more comfortable when asking someone to work on a project with him, not the other way around. “At first I wondered, Can I work outside my comfort zone?” Jacobs says. “I tried to think about what Fendi meant to me—I thought back to Karl and the late ’70s, and then I thought about, What is Fendi today? I took a look at what Kim is doing, and the Baguettes, put it all together, and finally I decided to stop overanalyzing it and just have fun with it and see what I could bring to Fendi.”
What he could bring, in addition to runway looks that further explored his recent experiments in proportion, which have consumed his New York runways—those humongous sweaters, those voluptuous trousers—is an unrivaled aesthetic dissertation on the logo. This is a subject Jacobs knows intimately, reaching back to his days at Vuitton. “I thought about what we are doing with bags at Marc Jacobs right now—we have really gotten into logos the last couple of seasons; it’s what people like.” And so he has echoed the typeface decorating his wildly popular “The Tote Bag,” applying it to a purse that now reads “The Baguette” over “Fendi Roma.” “I kind of mixed the two together—it’s a link between Fendi and our own product,” he says. Details of the clothes Jacobs has done for Fendi reference the Baguette as well, with Baguette-shaped pockets adorned with double Fs.
In truth, though, Jacobs’s admiration for the house goes far beyond the Baguette. If Jones claims he remembers every single night on the town, even if they took place 25 years ago, Jacobs confesses that he has only the haziest recollections of crazy bacchanalia with best pals Kate and Naomi—but there is one crystal-clear memory that he holds dear: “When I was 16, I went to Capri with my grandmother,” Jacobs says. “I was hanging out with Egon von Furstenberg and a bunch of other people, and I met Carla Fendi. My eyes were so wide open, I was in heaven. I got to meet a Fendi sister!”
