Linda Evangelista, the It Bag and ‘Sex and the City’

New York Fashion Week began in earnest with a time-space collapse Friday night at the Hammerstein Ballroom in midtown Manhattan.

Orchestrated by Fendi and Kim Jones, its creative director, it was nominally a celebration of 25 years of its famous Baguette handbag, the loaf-shaped purse created by Silvia Venturini Fendi in 1997. Mostly, however, it was an extravaganza from the late 1990s memory bank, down to the 1,000 mostly mask-less guests who crammed into the show.

Forget going back to the before Covid times. This was going premillennial. Pre-social media. You can understand the impulse. (It’s the same one that has made prequels so popular.) When the future is uncertain, there’s nothing more tempting than the security of the past. It looks so good in the rearview mirror.

This particular revisionist history involved contributions from Marc Jacobs, the downtown designer darling who happened to become creative director of Louis Vuitton in 1997, and Sarah Jessica Parker, the actor who played the famously Baguette-obsessed Carrie in the TV show “Sex and the City,” based on the book written in (yup) 1997.

And it culminated in a return to the runway by Linda Evangelista, the supermodel who became the face of the Baguette’s 25th anniversary ad campaign after publicly revealing that she had been the victim of a cosmetic surgical procedure that went wrong, and who had graced the cover of Vogue’s September issue in (you guessed it) 1997.