It has come to my attention that Fendi, iconic Italian fashion house, has resurrected the handbag that was so popular it got its own goddamn storyline on Sex and the City: The baguette bag, a teensy little antidote to the minimalism of the ‘90s that tracks perfectly with the clothes of now, which are also the clothes of roughly 1998. I’m sure there are some who are pleased with this development, but I’d like to say for the record that Fendi can keep their goddamn bag, because I don’t want it!
Certainly there are other people who have been clamoring for this bag’s return, and its general silhouette, which was inspired by an actual baguette. Unstuffed with life’s detritus, a Fendi baguette bag is a floppy little rectangle of a bag sized to fit squashed up in the armpit of the wearer. It is a small bag; it comes in a variety of colors and levels of bedazzlement. It doesn’t hold much, but perhaps that’s the point. It was, as Vogue points out, an It bag, and one of the first: “It’s the diametric opposite of the wildly popular and utilitarian nylon backpacks from Prada that predated it.” It’s a bag that inspires frenzy, and while I understand the reasoning, I still don’t like it.
Carrie Bradshaw, bless her heart, is basic.
Status aside, a baguette bag is simply basic. Carrie Bradshaw’s slavish devotion to them is because Fendi was one of the first big houses to loan to Sex and the City. Carrie Bradshaw, bless her heart, is basic. A baguette bag is meant to communicate a devil-may-care attitude towards life and love in the big city, but really, it screams impracticality and, for the record, is hideous? God love a tiny bag simply because it’s tiny, but if you’re going to go tiny, might I suggest literally anything other than a bag whose inspiration was a French man cramming a loaf of carbs under his arm and hustling off towards his beautiful home to drink vin and look at le Tour Eiffel. Oui, oui, monsieur, but come on!
There are many other bags to pin one’s hopes and dreams upon should you desire a handbag that indicates your status: I do not know where your bag journey will take you personally, but mine has led me directly to this Louis Vuitton Cerises Speedy bag—a collaboration with Takashi Murakami that I have coveted since the first time I laid eyes on it. Yes, I’m aware that this bag is extremely expensive, and I am also aware that it is petite. However, I could cram a book into this bag, and I could not cram anything other than a pocket edition of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run into a Fendi baguette bag and still be able to close it! For that, the Vuitton wins.
Of course, it is the exclusivity. Rich people don’t need things, because they have drivers who drive cars that have trunks that can hold a change of clothes for brunch and a collapsible blowout bar, hairstylist included. All one needs in this life of sin—if you are rich, Carrie Bradshaw, or a socialite with a townhouse that is so large it cannot possibly contain your ennui—is whatever fits in a baguette bag: Virginia Slims, a lipstick, a rattling bottle of pills, the key to the yacht and the house in East Hampton, three years’ worth of utility bills, and a handful of quarters.