Icons from cultural archives: Fendi’s Baguette bag tells stories that money alone can't buy
There's a textile artist in the Southern Highlands who spends her days with flames and flora, dyeing Australian Merino wool over open fire using inks extracted from scribbly gum bark.
Two years of study at Sturt Gallery & Studios taught Natalie Miller the continuous rya knot, an ancient technique that requires no tools beyond human hands. Now, from her studio in East Kangaloon, she's created something that speaks to both heritage and reinvention: a Fendi Baguette woven entirely by hand.
This is the essence of Fendi's ‘Hand-in-hand’ initiative, which began quietly across Italy in 2020 and has since travelled to Scotland, Japan, China, Madagascar, and now Australia. The premise is deceptively simple: take the Baguette bag, Silvia Venturini Fendi's 1997 design that became shorthand for status, and reimagine it through the lens of local craft. What emerges is something rarer than a luxury product—a dialogue between Italian heritage and global artisanship.
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Australian textile artist Natalia Miller’s Fendi Baguette is woven entirely by hand
Australian textile artist Natalie Miller’s Australian Merino wool creation comes to life with this Fendi Baguette iteration
In Japan, fourth-generation artisan Aya Nishikata employed gold brocade methods and the finest hand-weaving tradition for the Fendi Baguette bag
Miller's interpretation reflects the landscape that surrounds her. The neutral palette echoes the patchwork fields and golden sunsets of the Southern Highlands. The wool comes from a Tasmanian farm known for its soft texture, processed at Nundle Woollen Mill in New South Wales using machinery from the early 1900s.
After hand-dyeing, the wool dries for days before being hand-wound into balls and woven using traditional techniques. The result carries the quiet authority of something made slowly, deliberately, without compromise.
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Fourth-generation Japanese artisan Aya Nishikata employed gold brocade methods and the finest hand-weaving tradition for the Fendi Baguette bag
Elsewhere, the initiative has sparked equally distinctive collaborations.
In Japan, fourth-generation artisan Aya Nishikata employed gold brocade methods and the finest hand-weaving tradition, Tsuzure Ori, using hand-dyed wool in gradations of indigo, purple, and cherry pink.
In Scotland, Claire Campbell’s contemporary tartan design and manufacturing brand Prickly Thistle created a tartan registered in the Scottish Register of Tartans, weaving in the number five for the five Fendi sisters and dates marking the house's founding and iconic bag launches.
From the heart of Madagascar, the Baguette was crafted alongside Made For A Woman, a socially responsible women-led social entrepreneurship project dedicated to empowering Malagasy artisans. The end result used locally sourced raphia from the humble Madagascar palm tree, accompanied by the line of red carnelian beads across the flap and below, a touch that honours Madagascar, often known as the ‘Red Island’.
Prickly Thistle’s Baguette bag used Scottish tartan that required close collaboration to encode meaning into pattern
What unites these disparate creations isn't aesthetic conformity but shared values: preservation of technique, transmission of knowledge, and respect for time.
Miller's Baguette takes weeks to complete. The Scottish tartan required close collaboration to encode meaning into pattern. The Yi artisans' silver buckle involves melting metal into delicate filigree.
These are processes that that insist on human presence and resist mass mechanisation.
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The Fendi Baguette from Scotland
The Fendi Baguette from Madagascar
In China, artisans from the Yi nationality—an ethnic group with centuries of embroidery tradition—crafted a Baguette in black velvet with silk thread and a sterling silver buckle made using ancestral techniques.
For Fendi, approaching its centenary, 'hand in hand' represents more than brand extension. It's an acknowledgment that true luxury lies not in exclusivity alone but in connection—between past and present, between maker and wearer, between disparate cultures united by craft. Each Baguette becomes a vessel for stories that transcend transaction: Miller's Southern Highlands studio, Scottish clan heritage, Yi embroidery passed through fourteen generations.
Artisans from the Yi nationality—an ethnic group in China with centuries of embroidery tradition—crafted a Baguette in black velvet with silk thread
In China, the Baguette is in black velvet with silk thread and a sterling silver buckle made using ancestral techniques
In China, the Fendi Baguette is reimagined in black velvet with silk thread and a sterling silver buckle made using ancestral techniques
In an era when luxury often equates to speed and availability, these bags offer something increasingly scarce: evidence of human skill, patience, and the stubborn refusal to let ancient techniques fade.
They’re icons, certainly. But they’re also archives, ambassadors, and testaments to what survives when hands meet across continents, guided by shared respect for making things properly.
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