Roz had to have a Kate Spade purse. Ellen too, I think.
At Nordstrom's, they would study the bright-colored plain purses with the name displayed so vividly on the outside.
Eventually meds and visits to psychiatrists became part of our lives along with trips to the mall to buy clothes. I didn't realize that that Kate Spade was a real person and that these problems were part of her life too.
As a mother in West Los Angeles, I fought off the drugs and demons that attacked my kids: alcohol, anorexia, celebrity craziness, competition for sexiness, fashion wars, driving on freeways at age 16, keeping up with kids who were richer and more glamorous, getting into colleges that were good enough.
I didn't realize that even in the high echelons of New York fashion, girls and women faced the same terrors.
Today I grieve for Kate Spade. Her brand will forever bear the imprint of her suicide, stamped on the outside of the bags like her name.
I can't stand knowing that she died by a scarf tied to a doorknob and around her neck. I shudder. It's all here in this article by Vanessa Friedman, Matthew Schneier, and Jonah Engel Bromwich in the New York Times:
"Her bags... were just like her; colorful and unpretentious," they write. It was the 90s, and "the time of the handbag." As a boomer, I never had interest in purses like that. Canvas bags met all my needs.
But in the fashion world, "the definition of a handbag was strictly European, all decades-old serious status and wealth."
Except that she grew up in Kansas and studied journalism at Arizona State University.
With that kind of a pedigree, you can't break into socialite New York City, much less Europe. But she did. The cost of trying must have been great.
"Aside from Hollywood, no business is as seductive and brutish, as cruel and transactional as fashion," writes Maureen Callahan in the New York Post.
I grieve for Kate's 13-year-old daughter. No child should have to face life after her mother's planned death.
I count all those years of difficult motherhood, trying to build my own life and career while nurturing children. While doing a poor job of nurturing them, actually.
All those years of trying to make a marriage work long after the magic has worn off. Rumors say Andrew Spade was seeking a divorce.
In the details of her death, Kate followed the suicide in 2014 of stylist L'Wren Scott: the scarf, the door knob. Her husband, from whom she had been separated for two years, was in the house.
She left a note for her daughter, telling her "Don't feel guilty. Ask your dad."
She also left a foundation dedicated to "economic equality for women."
Has a male fashion designer committed suicide lately? No.
Therefore, I attribute her death not only to depression and bipolar illness but to inequalities still faced by women.
She is not alone.
She died on the fiftieth anniversary of Bobby Kennedy's death and on a day when Americans were asked to go to the polls and vote. These weights hung heavy on her shoulders along with her own illness. There comes a time when life is just too heavy.
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