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 needlepoint-stitch-kit Baguette, 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 Old Greenwich’s 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.