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Hello from the craft corner. At the end of last year, I took on the challenge of stitching Fendi’s needlepoint Baguette in time for New York Fashion Week. This is the story of its making.
It all started in November with a PR blast announcing that Fendi’s Baguette needlepoint stitch kit, first introduced in 2009, had been reintroduced. At the time I had no idea that the DIY bag had become an online fad; I was just excited at the possibility of a project that brought together my work and personal passions: fashion and needlepointing.
Passing by my local stitchery, The Village Ewe, on my commute to the city inspired this hobby. Though I worried it made me the most Connecticut woman in the world, I quickly got hooked by the manual and meditative nature of sewing. And you can measure your progress as you fill in all the squares on the canvas. My only issue is that I’m never quite satisfied with my stitching and often want to pull out all the yarn and start again. (Actually, a question I’ve been getting about the Fendi Baguette kit is, “Can you remake it multiple times?” In theory, yes, but the canvas will start to stretch.)
I reached out to Fendi to see if they’d be interested in a collaboration. My idea was to design the Baguette using archival Vogue imagery. The PR team was in, and soon an enormous yellow bag arrived at the office. Inside was a big yellow box with the canvas Baguette surrounded by skeins of thread in many colors, a needle, thimbles, and a suggested Greek key pattern. Putting that guide aside, I logged into the Vogue Archive and typed in “Christian Bérard.” Known to his friends (who included Coco Chanel and Christian Dior) as Bébé, he was a fashion fixture in Paris before and after the war. Almost a century later, Anna Sui continues to reference him. He’s one of my favorite artists. I love his free and expressive line as well as his way with color.
I knew what I was looking for: a 1937 page of his butterfly drawings. There’s one with human eyes that has always been intriguing. The second step was to start going through Vogue covers year by year. I pulled lots of Art Deco options and an outlier from 1908. This featured what I would describe as a drip logo, prefiguring the graffiti of Craig Costello, a.k.a. Krink. But I digress.
Next up was a meeting with our global design director, Parker Hubbard, who voted for the drip and helped me lay out the butterflies. We decided on the butterflies for the front and the logo for the back. Wanting to find something for the sides and bottom of the bag, I asked Isaac Lobel in the archive if he had a copy of the 1939 issue of Vogue Paris with a photo of Bérard’s needlepoint on the cover. I was guessing there might be some more stitching inside. The issue wasn’t available in New York, but Laure Fournis, the French archivist, managed to dig up a copy and share some digital files.
There was no time to have the bag painted by a needlepoint artist, so Parker and I transferred the design the old-fashioned way, tracing it from a pattern. Armed with printouts to reference, I headed home and made my first stitch on December 20. It soon became clear that the twist we had envisioned for the handle and sides was beyond me, so I attempted to re-create one of the abstract flowers from that 1939 magazine that looked butterfly-ish. As for colors, I had gotten so used to seeing the tan canvas of the blank Baguette and the black-and-white printouts that I chose a sand color for the bag’s body and slate grays for the designs.
And so I started embroidering. I stitched on planes and on the Metro-North train; I stitched in meetings, and I dreamed of stitching. There were weekly check-ins with my friends at The Village Ewe, who gave me advice and cheered me on. Not satisfied with my stitching of the logo, I decided to switch the palette from grays to muted blues. And I was beginning to think things were looking a bit flat and experimented with beading one of the butterflies. The text with big black beads worked, but in the end I used micro glass beads in a steely blue. Baguettes have a soft construction, and to give the bag some structure, I sewed wire into the seams and at the top of the front flap. A little more than a month into the project, I was despairing of the stitching on the sides of the bag—the narrowest and most difficult area to sew—and pulled out almost all of that area and gave it another go. The last piece was the small strap, which I did in blue and sand stripes, edged with beads.
Dear reader, the goal was met: I carried the bag during New York Fashion Week. It proves, I guess, that you can have your Baguette and wear it too.
Documenting the Process
