In 1997 Silvia Venturini Fendi designed a small flat bag meant to tuck under the arm the way Parisian women carried their bread, and accidentally invented the modern handbag business. The Baguette was the first It bag: produced in endless variations, over a thousand documented versions from sequins to shearling, seeded to exactly the right wrists, and made scarce enough to chase. Then in 2000 a television robbery scene gave it the most famous line in handbag history, this is not a bag, it is a Baguette, and the chase went global. The 2019 relaunch, complete with a Sarah Jessica Parker cameo, closed the loop, and a 25th-anniversary runway show in New York confirmed what the resale market already knew.
The file's favorite detail is the argument over the middle years. The market record treats the Baguette as discontinued for a stretch before 2019; Venturini Fendi's own line to the trade press was that the Baguette never really went away. The house denying its bag was ever gone, while relaunching it, is precisely the kind of claim a file exists to record without settling. Both versions are written down here.
The first It bag is also a first-order counterfeiting target, and its thousand-version history means no single reference look exists. Date the bag by its era markings first, then judge the variant against documented editions, because with a Baguette the variant is the value.
Fendi does not encode dates, but it brackets them: bags before 1980 carry no serial, the serial era runs 15 to 17 characters on leather with the first six naming the model and none of it naming a year, the hologram sticker era runs 2004 to 2010, and the sewn RFID pouch takes over from 2010, with 2015 the one changeover year where both markings can legitimately coexist. A hologram and an RFID pouch together in any other year is the classic fake tell, a pouch with no chip inside is another, and the era the markings claim must agree with the model's own documented birthday, which is what the serial era guide on this site checks in one step.
Model histories and date-code systems compiled from documented maison history, resale-industry authentication references, and period documentation, cross-checked across independent sources.