Kate Spade,
an iconic fashion designer known for her sleek handbags, dies at age 55 of an apparent suicide by hanging.
NEW YORK — Kate Spade, a fashion designer known for her sleek handbags, was found hanged in the bedroom of her New York apartment Tuesday in an apparent suicide, police said. She was 55.
Spade’s body was found by a housekeeper not long after 10 a.m., police said. Her husband and business partner Andy Spade was in the apartment at the time.
The police department’s chief of detectives, Dermot Shea, said that while investigators were still in the early stages of their inquiry, evidence including the state of the apartment and the presence of a note pointed to “a tragic suicide.”
The couple’s 13-year-old daughter was at school. Shea wouldn’t discuss what was in the note, but law enforcement officials told The Associated Press that it contained a message to the teenage girl telling her it was not her fault.
“We are all devastated by today’s tragedy,” her family said in a statement through a spokesman. “We loved Kate dearly and will miss her terribly.”
The company she founded and later sold, Kate Spade New York, now has over 140 retail shops and outlet stores across the U.S. and more than 175 shops internationally.
Born Katherine Brosnahan in Kansas City, Mo., Spade graduated from Arizona State University in 1985 with a degree in journalism. She told The New York Times in 1999 that she wanted to be “behind the scenes, like in that movie ‘Broadcast News.’ Holly Hunter — her I wanted to be.”
She was working as an accessories editor at Mademoiselle magazine when she launched her company with husband Andy in their New York apartment in 1993. She started the company based on six shapes of bags that she thought every working woman needed. It created a smash.
“I grew up in the Midwest, where you have to have it (a fashion item) because you like it, not because you’re supposed to have it,” she said in 2004. “For our customers, fashion is in the right place in their life. It’s an adornment, not an obsession.”
From the original boxy handbags, she expanded into shoes, luggage and other accessories, as well as a home line, stationery and three books. Spade won multiple awards from the Council of Fashion Designers of America and was named a “giant of design” by House Beautiful magazine.
Vanity Fair wrote in a 2002 profile of the Spades that they had “built a $70 million business by knowing what they don’t want to be — too luxe, too hip, too retro, too fashionable, too fast. In other words, they’re having fun being exactly who they are.”
She walked away from the company in 2007, a year after it was acquired from the Neiman Marcus Group for $125 million by the company then known as Liz Claiborne Inc.
Coach, now known as Tapestry, bought the Kate Spade brand last year for $2.4 billion.
Meanwhile, Spade and her husband — brother of comedian David Spade — started a new handbag company a few years ago, Frances Valentine.
“I will never forget the first Kate Spade bag I got for Christmas in college,” tweeted Jenna Bush Hager, daughter of former President George W. Bush. “She was a trailblazer. Her life and death are a reminder that pain doesn’t discriminate. Sending love to her family.”