In 1997, Silvia Venturini Fendi designed a small, compact bag with a short strap, meant to be tucked under the arm. She was thinking of French women carrying baguettes home from the bakery, the loaf tucked snug under the arm. She named the bag after the bread.

It became the first true It-bag of the modern era. Over a million sold in twenty years, in more than a thousand variations. No handbag had ever been collected like that, season after season.

Handmade, the Fendi way

Rooted in Italian craftsmanship, Fendi has long combined traditional leatherworking techniques with intricate hand-finished details. The Baguette's whole identity is surface: beading, embroidery, sequins, intarsia, fur. That surface work is where the hand hours live.

The showpiece example: a recent hand-embroidered Baguette edition carried 39,500 beads and 475 mirrors, about 138 hours of handwork, with the mirror embroidery executed by Mumbai's Chanakya artisans and final assembly in Italy. (That one also sparked a debate about crediting the Indian mirror-work tradition, which is its own story.)

Fendi's Selleria tradition, hand saddle-stitching descended from Roman master saddlers, still shows up in hand-stitched leather editions. It's one side of the house's craftsmanship. The Baguette brings that heritage into conversation with something far more experimental: a bag whose silhouette stays recognizable even when its entire surface changes.

The first It-bag

Before the Baguette, famous bags were famous quietly. The Birkin had a waitlist and a whisper network. The Baguette was different: buyable, visible, collectible. No Birkin-style games. The Baguette was different: visible, collectible, and available in an ever-changing parade of materials and colors. You might miss one season's design, but another was already coming. It turned the handbag into a seasonal event. Every It-bag since, from the Dior Saddle to the Balenciaga City, follows the playbook the Baguette wrote.

The Baguette's success was so total it changed the company's fate. In 1999, amid the house's rapid expansion, LVMH and Prada struck a deal to acquire a controlling stake in Fendi. LVMH would eventually take full control.

"It's not a bag, it's a Baguette"

Fendi was the first luxury house to lend pieces to Sex and the City's costume designer, Patricia Field. Then came the mugging scene: a thief demands the bag, and the character corrects him. "It's not a bag, it's a Baguette."

Sarah Jessica Parker later called it a defining moment, the beginning of everything. She wasn't exaggerating. That one line welded the bag to a generation's idea of what a fashion bag even is. The purple sequined Baguette from the show became arguably the most recognizable version ever made.

The fall

By the late 2000s, the Baguette had lost much of its It-bag momentum. Logo fatigue set in, and the spotlight shifted to newer silhouettes. Y2K style became a punchline instead of an aspiration. Fendi itself moved on: the Peekaboo, launched in the late 2000s, became the house's new icon, all craftsmanship and restraint. The Baguette sat in closets and consignment shops, a relic of the Paris Hilton era.

The resurgence

Nostalgia runs on a twenty-year cycle, and the Baguette's number came up right on schedule. In 2019 Fendi re-released the purple sequined SATC Baguette and launched the #BaguetteFriendsForever campaign, reconnecting the bag with the generation that loved it and introducing it to a new one. The bag returned in And Just Like That in 2021. The 25th anniversary in 2022 brought a New York runway spectacle and a flood of archival re-editions. Gen Z, discovering the bag through vintage dealers and TikTok, made the originals cool again. The 15th-birthday exhibition at Paris's Colette back in 2012 now looks like an early signal of what was coming.

What a new one costs

A standard medium Baguette in leather runs roughly $3,500 to $4,300 today, depending on material. Recent examples: a brown leather version with white embroidery at $3,750, a needlepoint edition with an estimated retail of $3,890. Current Mini versions run roughly $2,500–$3,300, depending on materials and edition. Special hand-embroidered editions can exceed $8,000.

For context, the original 1997 Baguette retailed for a fraction of that. Luxury pricing has moved a lot in thirty years.

What changed with the new ones

The silhouette is the same, but the details moved on:

Straps. The original had one short shoulder strap: the under-arm tuck was the whole point. New Baguettes come with a detachable longer crossbody strap alongside the short handle, so the bag converts from shoulder to crossbody. More practical. Less of a statement.

Sizes. The line is now a full family: Nano, Mini, Medium, Large. The original was essentially one little loaf.

Materials and hardware. New fabrications every season, updated FF clasps, modern interior layouts.

Price. See above. The new ones cost like the luxury icon the Baguette became, not the fun seasonal bag it started as.

Why people still love the vintage ones best

And the value. Let's be honest about where the market actually is: not every vintage Baguette is a four-figure collectible. But the desirable embroidered, sequined, and unusual runway-era fabrications are a different story. Rare examples can command several thousand dollars, with particularly sought-after pieces advertised for $4,000 or more.

Compare that with a new, hand-embroidered Baguette that can cost over $8,000. There's a compelling case for owning an original from the era that made the bag famous, rather than a modern reinterpretation.

And we've seen just how dramatically the market can change. Back in 2022, The RealReal reported that demand for vintage Baguettes was growing six times faster than for newer versions, with average resale value reaching four times its 2017 baseline.

That doesn't mean every Baguette will appreciate. It means fashion can completely reassess something it once considered outdated.

A new Baguette is a beautiful bag. A vintage one is an artifact: the bag that helped invent the modern It-bag, from the years when it was doing exactly that. You can feel the difference when you pick it up.

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*P.S. Yes, the bags are real. I checked. Twice.*

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Sources and further reading

• Christie's: How the Fendi Baguette became a cult classic
• Vogue: Fendi re-releases 25 archival Baguettes for the 25th anniversary
• Refinery29: The Fendi Baguette comeback and The RealReal's resale data
• W Magazine: The Fendi Baguette is back
• Fendi: Current handbag collection and retail prices
• Particle: Fendi Baguette mirror-work and the credit debate