How Kate Spade went from editor to designing her first bag
365 days of fashion: the e-ncyclopedia of fashion
Friday, December 22, 2023
Today, we want to celebrate with anticipation the upcoming birthday of the American fashion designer Kate Spade, who was born on December 24, 1962, and passed away too young, on June 5, 2018.
Despite that Kate Spade New York offers nowadays a variety of items - clothes, shoes, accessories, jewelry, fragrances, and home decor, the brand’s signature item has always been handbags, and it has an interesting launch story.
In the early 1990s, a young Kate Spade (then Kate Brosnahan) from Kansas City studied journalism at Arizona State University. She then moved to New York and landed a position as an accessories editor at Mademoiselle magazine, before realizing this job wasn’t made for her.
Kate Spade was frustrated she couldn’t find the perfect, fashionable handbag and had been looking for it for years.
“At the time, things were very—bags were too complicated. And I really loved very simple kind of architectural shapes. And I would wear these very simple shapes, none of which were famous designers. I mean, there were no names. If someone were to say, whose is that? I’d say, I don’t know, I bought it at a vintage store or it’s a straw bag I got in Mexico,” she said, as wrote Quartz.
“So - and they were all very square and simple. And I thought, gosh, I mean, why can’t we find something just clean and simple and modern?”
And so, Kate decided to change things and design the perfect bag herself. On a note of inspiration, she sketched it in her apartment and made samples out of construction paper.
This creativity outburst transformed into six versions of a bag called “Sam” with which Kate Spade and her husband Andy Spade (who withdrew $35,000 from his 401K account to fund the production of the handbags)