The woman stepping into Kate Spade’s multimillion-dollar shoes
‘Kate was one of the reasons I decided to go into fashion’
‘For affordable luxury, Kate was a pioneer, a trailblazer’
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 (and gets stronger when she goes home), 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 (its first-ever catwalk presentation) was a revolution. Out went the boxy Fifties 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 springclean of the brand’s vast inventory, including its homeware. In the spirit of Marie Kondo (the Japanese decluttering expert), if it didn’t spark joy, it was purged.
When I meet 46-year-old Glass at her recently redecorated office in a corporate wedge of uptown Manhattan, the powder-puff pink walls (Farrow & Ball Peignoir) 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, confirmed in the job in January, 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 form. She previously worked in Gucci’s handbag division, alongside Alessandro Michele, Gucci’s Midas-like creative director, when it was based in London under Tom Ford. 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 – the woman and the brand – 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.
“My mum was very stylish – she’d go to Jaeger and she wore a lot of Jackie O-style headscarves, but it was a challenge sourcing things.”
Glass’s style influences were diverse – including her mother, Bananarama and Margo from The
Good Life. Elements of all of them, including her mother’s headscarves, worked their way into her debut show for Kate Spade. She also used to cut out articles on Spade. “She was such a shining example of a female entrepreneur who’d set up a successful business,” she says. “I really felt if she could do it, coming from Missouri, then I could maybe do something in fashion, coming from Belfast.”
It has been a winding road. Her late father was a radiologist who encouraged his children to follow in his career footsteps (both of her siblings did). Glass briefly studied architecture in Edinburgh, before eventually pitching up at the Royal College of Art to study bag design while she interned at Alexander Mcqueen.
“The brand had become a bit cookie-cutter,” she says of Kate Spade. Following its founder’s departure in 2007, Kate Spade expanded rapidly, at the expense, most industry analysts agree, of any personality. In 2017, it was acquired by Tapestry (which also owns Stuart Weitzman and Coach, latterly modernised by another Brit, Stuart Vevers).
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 in high and affordable luxury at Gucci and Kors, Glass could see the potential. One of her first acts was to strip away any fussy bows ( just as one of the first styling jobs Michael Kors, her old boss, undertook was to demand that his mother remove all the bows from her second wedding dress).
The result is a batch of distinctive bags that look much more expensive than they are, including the streamlined Nicola shoulder bag, which has a spade-shaped clasp, and a laser-cut, spade motif, leather bucket with handpainted edges (which require a higher quality of leather than ones that are sewn or glued) and removable drawstring lining.
“When I began researching the company, it struck me that there were no distinguishing emblems, which was crazy, given that they had this fabulous spade shape in the name,” she says.
Glass’s team spent a long time researching the hardware to ensure it was both functional and refined.
Do guns for hire like herself carry around a repertoire of design tricks from label to label?
“There’s a bit of that,” she concedes. “You develop a knack for knowing where your eye needs to focus, but you also bounce around a lot with the team.”
While Glass is convinced that customers can see when corners have been cut, she is determined to raise Kate Spade’s game without hiking up the prices. She was at Michael Kors when Kors by Kors, his second line, kick-started a global rush for £300-£400 bags. “I’ve learnt how to make a £400 bag look the best it can and it will really last,” she says.
“I really love where Kate Spade sits – the sweet spot for a dress is around £400-£500. You should be able to expect quality and longevity for that. It’s not cheap, but it feels a lot more relevant than all those luxury brands charging £2,000.”
The way Glass thinks about details, her own idiosyncratic style and her unforced playfulness make her a natural fit with Kate Spade, but that doesn’t mean the job’s a breeze.
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 – more lifestyle emphasis, more individual, like the original Spade stores.
It’s a lot to take on, and the US is remarkably un-progressive when it comes to holidays and work-life balance. Glass seems unfazed. She and her photographer husband and six-year-old son have breakfast together most mornings in a café near their home in Brooklyn before the school bus leaves at 7.15am. “I never do consecutive nights out, even for work,” she says. Her sanctuary is their weekend place in Montauk, Long Island, and laying the table while her husband cooks – watch out for upgraded tableware from Kate Spade. “I love the breadth of this brand and the fact that I can look at a print someone’s designed in the ready-towear 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.”