Meet Kate Spade’s new successor
Nicola Glass says the late designer was one of the reasons she got into fashion
For someone perched atop a billion-dollar a year brand as famous as Kate Spade, Nicola Glass is remarkably softly spoken. Going back over my interview with her later is like listening to Jackanory. The Belfast accent is strong, but the pitch is goose-down.
Let us not be deceived, though. Glass’s first show for the label during New York Fashion Week in September was a revolution. Out went the boxy 50s silhouettes and generic bags. In blew flattering, fit and flare silk crepe de chine midis and expensive-looking accessories.
In nine months, she has undertaken a spring clean of the brand’s vast inventory, including its homeware.
When I meet Glass at her recently redecorated office in a corporate wedge of uptown Manhattan, the powder-puff pink walls and an Art Deco sideboard she bought in Paris are a valiant rebuttal to the uninspiring architecture outside. So are her lilac platform suede sandals, which match the rug under her desk — and that slice of white-blonde hair. It is as distinctive, in its way, as Kate Spade’s own brunette bouffant.
It’s also partly shaven, a dramatic departure for the Spade brand, steeped as it always has been in bouncy, approachable mid-century American glamour. “I think it might be a first,” says Glass. “I was reading the in-house rule book just after I started and it said shop employees couldn’t have visible tattoos or shaved heads, so I guess that rules me out of working in the stores.”
Glass may be just what the company needs after a challenging year. Kate Spade, the much-loved founder, hadn’t worked with the company for a decade, but her death last June, at the age of 55, cast an inevitable shadow.
Glass has previously worked in Gucci’s handbag division, alongside Alessandro Michele, Gucci’s Midas-like creative director. She then moved to Michael Kors in New York as senior vice-president of accessories.
The designer arrived at Kate Spade with the best part of two decades of experience in the luxury market and a nuanced understanding of what Spade represented.
“Kate was one of the reasons I decided to go into fashion,” she says. “Growing up in Belfast, there really wasn’t that much fashion.”
Spade’s quirky charm and gift for simple, clean lines and invigorating shots of colour had been diluted — fatally, as far as the cognoscenti were concerned. But having worked both at Gucci and Kors, Glass could see the potential.
This is a juggernaut of a brand, and Glass has to navigate a path between expansion and singularity. She’ll be overseeing a makeover of the shops soon. It’s a lot to take on, but Glass seems unfazed. “I love the breadth of this brand and the fact that I can look at a print someone’s designed in the ready-to-wear team and know that it would work better as a wallpaper.
“Kate built all that herself. And if we’re talking about affordable luxury, she was a pioneer. The more I know about her, the more I realise that she was a trailblazer.” –Telegraph Group Limited, London 2018