Why We Love the Fendi x Versace Fendace Safety Pin Baguette in Black

Fashion collaborations are usually a logo on someone else's product. Fendace was not that. It was two of the biggest houses in Italy handing each other the keys, and this Baguette is one of the few objects that came out of it that still makes sense years later.

The swap that nobody expected

In September 2021, at Milan Fashion Week, Fendi and Versace did something the industry had genuinely never seen. Kim Jones designed a Versace collection. Donatella Versace designed a Fendi collection. Not a capsule, not a co-branded print, an actual exchange of creative direction between two competing houses.

The theatre of it was extraordinary. Donatella walked in Fendi. Kim Jones took a bow in Versace. Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss and Gigi Hadid closed the show. The pieces reached stores in 2022 and then the whole thing stopped, permanently, which is the part that matters commercially. There was no second season and there will not be one.

That closed window is what turns a collaboration piece into a collectible. Most fashion collaborations are followed by another one that dilutes the first. Fendace has nothing after it.

The safety pin, and why it carries so much weight

The safety pin is not decoration here. It is probably the single most famous piece of hardware in fashion history.

In 1994, Elizabeth Hurley wore a black Versace dress held together at the sides by oversized gold safety pins to a film premiere, and the photographs went around the world. It made her a household name overnight, it cemented Versace's reputation for a very specific kind of controlled provocation, and it turned an ordinary fastening into a house signature.

Putting that pin on a Fendi Baguette is therefore not a styling flourish. It is one house's most loaded symbol placed on another house's most loaded object, which is exactly what the collaboration was designed to do. Anyone who knows the reference sees it immediately. Anyone who does not simply sees an unusual and rather beautiful piece of hardware.

The Baguette was the right bag to give away

Fendi could have offered any of its designs. The Baguette was the correct choice, and not only because it is the most famous.

Silvia Venturini Fendi designed it in 1997, and it did something structurally new. It was small, it was worn tucked under the arm like a French loaf, and it was released in an endless run of fabrics, embroideries and materials. That last part is the crucial bit. The Baguette was conceived from the beginning as a canvas for variation, a shape that exists to be reinterpreted.

So handing it to Donatella Versace was not a violation of the design. It was the design working exactly as intended. The Baguette has always been the bag that becomes something else, and this is simply its most unlikely version.

Black was the smart decision

Fendace was, by any measure, a loud collection. Baroque prints, gold everywhere, the two logos interlocked and repeated across everything. A great deal of it was made to be photographed rather than carried.

This piece is the exception, and that is precisely its value. Executed in plain black leather with the pin hardware as the only intervention, it takes the collaboration's idea and makes it wearable. You get the collectibility, the reference and the story, in a bag you can genuinely take to dinner without the whole outfit having to accommodate it.

Collectors tend to arrive at this conclusion eventually. The loudest pieces from a hyped collection are the ones that date fastest and the hardest to resell. The restrained pieces from the same collection are the ones people actually keep.

What it is like to own

The Baguette's proportions have not been improved on in nearly thirty years. It sits flat under the arm, it holds a phone, a card case, a lipstick and keys, and it makes almost any outfit look more deliberate than it is.

Black smooth leather is the most versatile finish it comes in, and the hardware provides all the contrast the bag needs. Worn short under the arm it is a nineties silhouette. On a longer strap it is a modern shoulder bag. There is very little it does not go with.

Almost untouched

This example is close to new. The leather is clean and unmarked and holds its shape and finish throughout. The only exterior wear is slight hairline scratching on the hardware buckle, visible on close inspection. Inside there are mild signs of use and a small dot-like mark on the base.

For a collectible piece, that condition is the whole point. Hardware scratching is unavoidable on any bag that has been opened and closed, and it is the least consequential kind of wear there is. What matters is that the leather is intact and the pin hardware is unbent and unmarked, and it is.

The case for buying it now

Limited collaborations follow a predictable pattern. They are widely available immediately after release, they thin out over the following two or three years as pieces disperse into private hands, and the good examples become genuinely hard to find after that.

Fendace is past the first stage and into the second. Pieces in this condition, in the wearable colourways rather than the printed ones, are already the harder half of the collection to source.

We love this Baguette because it is a piece of fashion history that you can actually use. Two houses, one famous pin, the most reinterpreted bag in Italy, and enough restraint in the execution that it will still look right in ten years.