The Enduring Legacy of Kate Spade’s Witty, Misunderstood Life

WALK INTO any Kate Spade or Frances Valentine store today, and you’d be forgiven for thinking the retailers are uncomplicatedly preppy—the kind of place where your mother might find an innocuous floral shift or clutch for a luncheon. But Katherine Noel Valentine Brosnahan Spade, the woman who co-founded those brands, was no Lilly Pulitzer during her outsize life, which was cut short by suicide in 2018.

With her partner, Andy Spade, she started Kate Spade with six boxy handbags in 1993. They weren’t married yet; she was the “Kate” and he was the “Spade.” The former fashion editor at Mademoiselle magazine and the brilliant adman made a dashing couple straight out of a Wes Anderson film: she with her chignons, heels and big jewellery, he with his Brooks Brothers—with-a-twist button-downs and jeans. They lived in pre-billionaire Tribeca; they drank martinis; everyone wanted in. Kate and Andy dreamed of a company they hoped would bridge the gap between L.L. Bean and Prada.

“We were just kids,” says Andy today from his new home in the San Francisco Bay Area. “We wanted to control our destiny so we just started a handbag company with no experience whatsoever.”

And boy, did they succeed. The household-name American brand would go on to include stationery, books, clothing, home goods, jewellery, shoes, the men’s line Jack Spade and licensing deals worldwide. Kate Spade’s nylon bags were coming-of-age talismans for girls and women at the turn of the 21st century, spawning oodles of Canal Street knockoffs. When Kate died, Vogue ’s Anna Wintour said, “There was a moment when you couldn’t walk a block in New York without seeing one of her bags, which were just like her; colourful and unpretentious.”

Yet despite the TikTok generation’s thirst for everything Y2K—from Fendi baguette bags to Juicy Couture tracksuits—Kate Spade’s brand heat under current owner Tapestry is lukewarm.

“Gen Zers and TikTok consumers are constantly looking to the ’90s and early aughts for trends,” says Casey Lewis, a consultant who writes “After School,” a youth-culture newsletter. “And so this seems like it would be prime time for a Kate Spade comeback.”

Some interest is bubbling up: Kate Spade recently reissued one small ’90s baguette bag with Urban Outfitters. Last year, it relaunched its original “Sam” bag. And prescient trendsetters are dusting off their vintage Kate Spade pieces. Yet a recent collaboration with Heinz ketchup left some consumers and analysts scratching their heads. Tapestry, which declined to comment, reported a 6% decrease in Kate Spade sales for the nine-month period ending in March 2024 compared with the previous year.

The challenge of evolving Kate’s aesthetic without her began while she was still alive, when the company she co-founded with Andy, Pamela Bell and Elyce Arons was sold to Neiman Marcus Group in 2006. The group, which had already bought 56 percent of the company in 1999, in turn sold it to Liz Claiborne. Coach, which is now Tapestry, acquired the brand in 2017 for $2.4 billion.

The enigma lies in decoding a fashion icon who was always more complex than polka dots or pink and green. Under Kate and Andy, the brand’s American joie de vivre was tempered with intellectual, offbeat references: architect Buckminster Fuller, Eames furniture, Rei Kawakubo. And along with joy and eclecticism, there was darkness. Her death at age 55 left behind a grieving husband, a 13-year-old daughter, Frances Valentine Beatrix Spade—and a towering style legacy that is often misunderstood.

After a company changes hands multiple times, and its founder dies, can its original vision endure?

“THE INTERPRETATION of [Kate’s] legacy is a little different from how she actually was,” says her co-founder Bell. “Because she was petite and so adorable, everyone associates her with the words cute or happy, and she was much more complicated and sophisticated than that.”

Andy, Kate, Bell and Arons all came from the Midwest. Their partnership coalesced at a summer share house in tony Amagansett, New York. Kate (friends called her Katy) was one of six kids from Kansas City, Missouri; Andy, the brother of comedian David Spade, was born in Birmingham, Michigan, and raised in Arizona. Kate and Andy both went to Arizona State University and met while working at the same Phoenix clothing store. Andy’s car broke down one day, and Kate offered him a ride.

“Katy was more subversive than anyone knew,” says Andy. “They just pigeonholed her as the girl next door. But she was a girl next door and a girl across the street, down the alley and across the hall.”

Kate wore avant-garde Japanese designs from Comme des Garçons and Sacai and hippie slips from Dosa. She loved dining on steaks at Raoul’s and Lucky Strike in SoHo, and hanging out with artists and weirdos. She played Bob Dylan loudly and read books by John Knowles and W. Somerset Maugham. She scoured Indian import stores in the East Village for brightly coloured silk tunics to wear with cigarette pants, pairing them with wild costume jewellery she’d picked up at the wholesalers on Sixth Avenue.

She and Andy also appreciated simplicity. As a design inspiration, the two often cited advice from The Elements of Style, Strunk and White’s manual for writers—“To achieve style, begin by affecting none.”

Kate’s niece Whitney Pozgay, a designer who worked at Kate Spade for years, describes the company culture as freewheeling and fun, with beer carts on Fridays and Phoenix and Björk on the sound system. She says Kate was bubbly and effervescent, coming down to the studio with her little dog Henry to tease, “Working hard or hardly working?”

In the early days, Kate and Andy gave each new employee a copy of Emily Post’s Etiquette. But in 2004, to put her own spin on propriety, Kate published three volumes: Manners, Style and Occasions. The advice offered was more madcap than proper: Admire the polka dots on a Wonder Bread package! Play “Electric Version” by the New Pornographers to start a party! Gift your beloved an Etch A Sketch for your iron wedding anniversary!

Writer Jill Kargman, who was Kate’s intern at Mademoiselle and stayed close with her, says the designer was a master of the written note, pairing formality with casualness and “sparkling chutzpah.” Whether in her correspondence or her style, she says, Kate had “total edge,” musing, “To think outside the box, you have to know what the box is. It’s like she studied the box, but then she flipped it a little bit and gave it a blood transfusion.”

The Spades were funny. When Kate and Andy hosted their first adult dinner party, the invitation went out with a copy of instructions for the Heimlich manoeuvre. While the brand was built on highlighting all the things Kate liked, she told Index magazine in 1998 that her customers were free to say: Who the hell cares what Kate Spade likes? (Andy says that David Spade always considered Kate to be funnier than all his comedian friends, including the late Chris Farley.)

Even the company’s signature—a small, humble black clothing label in the place of a logo—came from a place of irreverence: Kate thought the bag needed a little something, so right before the launch she put the inside label on the outside. For its first order, Barneys New York requested that the label be put back inside. But, Bell says, “Of course, after they became popular, they wanted them on the outside.”

As the brand took off, so did the couple’s social life. Although Andy, more than Kate, became a collector of bohemian downtown characters, she was always game. Gabi Asfour, co-founder of the artistic collective As Four, who once worked for the couple as a clothing designer, remembers staying up late drinking with the Spades at the Hôtel de Crillon during a trip to Paris. “What I loved is the clash of the roughness of downtown mixing with the cleanness of uptown,” he says.

That creative clash came through in the brand’s advertising, as masterminded by Andy alongside Julia Leach, now chief creative officer at Athleta. Andy commissioned filmmakers like Mike Mills and the Safdie brothers to direct shorts for the brand. The print ads, such as those photographed by artists Larry Sultan and Tim Walker, rarely did the basic job of displaying the handbags. The goal was something else entirely: to evoke feelings.

One campaign, shot by art-world chronicler Jessica Craig-Martin, was produced as an actual party at The Explorers Club in Manhattan, with Kate and Andy hosting. “The party was very real, totally madcap, and had been set up to elegantly fall apart in just the photogenic way I desired,” remembers Craig-Martin.

Another, by artist Tierney Gearon, depicted a day in the life of an elegant New England family: loading up the car, playing hide-and-seek, getting ready in the bathroom. Gearon says that although the pictures depicted a “perfect family,” she now finds them a little eerie.

Some collaborators have suggested that with these ads Andy was chasing a vision of perfection that is hard to achieve in real life. Today he says, “It definitely reflected how we felt as people.”

“It wasn’t trying to paint the picture-perfect version of white picket fences,” says Leach, who wrote scripts for these ads. She and Andy were thinking about John Updike’s and John Cheever’s stories about the beautiful flaws of American life.

KATE AND ANDY’S lightning in a bottle was all about giving glamour an off-kilter spin. Yes, an ad showing a kid seated on a toilet was weird, but it was playful—and just pretty enough. As Craig-Martin says, “The brilliance lay in the understanding of how the esoteric or sophisticated could be used to appeal to the mass market.”

Striking that balance without Kate and Andy’s input is tricky, and gets harder as the years go by.

“They get the ingredients, but not the recipe,” says Pozgay when discussing how her aunt’s style legacy is often interpreted. Yes, she loved pink, but it had to be the right pink, and perhaps shot through with a dark poppy-red stripe.

After selling the brand in 2006, Kate and Andy Spade agreed to stay on for six months to help with the transition. In the intervening years, the company has grown incrementally but lost some of its cultural cachet. This year, the Federal Trade Commission sued to block Tapestry’s $8.5 billion acquisition of Capri Holdings, which owns Michael Kors and Versace. In the meantime, Tapestry must prove its mettle with the heritage brands it already owns.

As for Frances Valentine, where Kate was working alongside her old friend and Kate Spade co-founder Arons when she died, the brand is owned by Andy, Arons and other investors, including venture-capital fund Sweater. The company reports 200 percent growth in its wholesale business from 2023 to 2024, and will launch at Dillard’s this fall. A recent visit to its small, quiet Sag Harbor, New York, store (one of nine) revealed preppy, retro classics like beaded sandals and beachy caftans. Arons is working on a forthcoming book about her friendship with Kate.

In the weeks following Kate’s death, sales surged at both Kate Spade and Frances Valentine. When a fashion designer or an artist dies, scarcity fuels demand—Alexander McQueen’s suicide in 2010 inspired a similar frenzy. It’s what happens after that bump that determines a brand’s longevity.

“How do you do justice to the spirit of the thing, but bring it to more people?” asks the chief creative officer of luxury resale retailer TheRealReal, Kristen Naiman, who worked at Kate Spade from 2014 to 2023. “That’s the name of the game when you scale something as special as what Kate and Andy made.”

While they were running the company, Andy would quote advertising executive Jay Chiat, who asked: How big can we get before we get bad? Today, he is at peace with how they handled the sale, which he equates with getting your teen child into college and then backing off.

“There are roots in that brand—Kate Spade—that are about values and people, and that’s what I wanted to do,” Andy says. “Build roots for the brand to exist forever. And I never looked back.”

During Kate and Andy’s time at Kate Spade, the company didn’t resort to one of the fashion industry’s lesser publicized strategies for growth: making products specifically targeted for outlet stores. Today, there is an extensive outlet network, including a newly launched dedicated e-commerce site. Kate Spade pajamas produced under a license were recently sold at Costco for less than $20.

“I think they have a lot of potential,” says Casey Lewis, the youth-culture consultant. “I would be shocked if they did not successfully make a comeback in the coming years, because the brand isn’t so watered down or so irrelevant that no one knows it at this point. They can just reclaim the cool.”

HANDBAGS ASIDE, Kate’s legacy also includes opening up conversations about mental health in fashion, a notoriously punishing industry.

When she died, the Kate Spade New York Foundation contributed $1 million immediately to mental-health and suicide prevention causes. “We really have the authentic responsibility to talk about it and to try to amplify it,” says Liz Fraser, Kate Spade’s current CEO. The company says it is now one of the world’s largest corporate donors to women’s mental-health initiatives.

During Kate’s time, such things weren’t spoken of. While the designer’s friends and family maintain that she was for the most part a genuinely happy, ebullient woman who loved her life and her family, everyone has their private struggles, and she was no different.

“Everyone’s like, ‘Well, what happened?’ ” says Bell. “I don’t think any one thing happened.”

Andy and Kate Spade were separated at the time of her death, but they were still very much a family unit with their daughter, known as Bea. “We loved each other very much and simply needed a break,” he said at the time.

Bell, who is a co-founder with Kenneth Cole of the Mental Health Coalition, says that she and Kate had a euphemism for therapists: “the contractor”—as in, someone who can fix you. “I regret that, because I think that we could have just said therapist…. I think we should have talked about it more openly,” she says.

The co-founder talks about how rough menopause can be on women and says that she’s been recommending Miranda July’s novel All Fours, which deals with that very topic, to everyone she knows: “I read it and I was like, I wish I knew this then.”

Kargman remembers thinking that Kate’s drinking had gone from celebratory to solitary in the last years of her life. She says, “I think I was already looking at it through the prism of slight worry, but never in a million years did I think she would take her life, not in a million years.” In a statement at the time of her death Andy said Kate was on medication for depression and anxiety but that there were no substance-abuse issues.

When a person becomes a brand, even when they are beloved, boundaries blur. Kate talked about adding “Frances Valentine” to her many names in 2016 to differentiate herself from the namesake brand she sold. But in a panel talk with Andy the following year, she seemed unsure about it. “I get confused,” she said. She ended up adding just “Valentine.”

One day, while shopping with Bea at a Kate Spade store after she had left the company, she was tickled when a sales associate asked if she was on the mailing list. She would have never cried, “I am Kate Spade.” When she appeared on her brother-in-law David’s sitcom Just Shoot Me in 2002, her only request was that her part become smaller.

While some might see a contradiction between a brand built on colour and optimism and the spectre of mental-health issues, Naiman thinks that makes the message behind Kate’s legacy all the more potent. She says, “I think that the deepest truth is that there’s something so powerful and incredible about saying that this person who made this incredibly joyous brand struggles.”

Today, Andy runs his Partners & Spade creative agency in California, and is still a partner in Frances Valentine as well as his pajama company, Sleepy Jones. He’s working on a sculpture show about Kate called Uncommon Flowers. He is, as ever, brimming with ideas, and very much still processing the death of the person he calls “the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

He chose the Bay Area, for one, to be off the grid: “It was purposeful to be disconnected, because my daughter and I didn’t want to be around the mayhem.”

In the early Kate Spade days, Andy would use the word mercury to describe a certain undefinable je ne sais quoi, a taste, a feeling. Recalling an old thermometer, he notes how you can’t put your finger on the quicksilver—it jumps at the merest touch. “I always thought we were mercury,” he says. “Just when they think they know who we are, it changes.”

Or as Kate herself put it, in 1998: “I mean, shit, we’re just doing what we like.”