Not just a bag: Fendi fetes its famed ‘Baguette’ in NYC

NEW YORK (AP) — You’d have thought it was a film premiere, with the hoopla converging exterior midtown Manhattan’s Hammerstein Ballroom. However inside, regardless of the superstar presence, the true star was a purse.

Not simply any purse, however the “Baguette” — the ever-present Fendi bag created 25 years in the past and named for the lengthy French loaf of bread and the best way it, too, is carried beneath the arm of the discerning purchaser. The Fendi present on Friday night time was an enormous celebration for the bag and its long-lasting declare to pop-culture fame.

However why New York, when Fendi normally reveals in Italy? The bag had early success and pop-culture resonance in New York, most memorably immortalized in a 2000 episode of “Intercourse and the Metropolis,” when a mugger had the temerity to attempt to take one from Carrie Bradshaw when he apparently didn’t know what it was known as.

“Gimme your bag,” the thug within the alley demanded. “It’s a baguette!” Carrie admonished him as he made off along with her shiny purple model.

It’s secure to say everybody knew their baggage from their baguettes on Friday night time, when about 600 individuals packed into the ballroom — some on the principle flooring and others in excessive balcony seating — to have a good time the bag and its many iterations through the years.

The night marked a three-way collaboration. Fendi girls’s designer Kim Jones had introduced in his good friend and onetime boss, Marc Jacobs — the quintessential New York designer — to lend his distinctive romantic streetwear vibe to a collection of 10 or so ensembles starring, in fact, the baguette. (“I’m by no means one to shrink back from an iconic bag,” Jacobs was quoted as saying in a theater-style program.) And jeweler Tiffany & Co. introduced its personal baguettes in signature robin’s-egg blue.

Within the entrance row sat Kim Kardashian, in blonde locks and a figure-hugging sheer and sequined costume, however the baguettes have been the deal with the runway. There have been large baguettes, small baguettes, nano-sized baguettes. Shiny baguettes, fluffy baguettes, sparkly and clean baguettes.

There have been fanny-pack baguettes, and typically double baguettes — two sizes stacked collectively. Pockets have been reimagined as baguettes. There have been tiny baguettes in satin common onto tube socks — an ideal place to place little devices — or when you needed them nearer to your head, hooked up to a satin baseball cap. The vibe was a mixture of fancy and informal, of sequins and sweatshirts.

Because the present started, an enormous drape on the wall dropped to the bottom to disclose a large mirror, abruptly permitting your entire room, balconies and all, to see itself. The fashions snaked alongside the ground, however once they have been carried out, the mirror abruptly disappeared and the fashions have been standing in an enormous show case, as if at a retailer.

Linda Evangelista, in an enormous Tiffany blue cape and robe, got here out with the designers for a last bow. They applauded her, in what was a really public second for the ’90s supermodel, now 57, after her latest ordeal with what she has described as a disastrous body-sculpting process that left her disfigured.