Last weekend, I tried to make myself invisible in a coffee shop. It’s a nook of a place on the way out to wine country here in Oregon, not far from my house. I’d already ordered and the counter was filling with families, retired friends and local college kids. I held back, waiting for my iced cold brew and to-go quiche in the dance that women who have retired the number 29 from their age bracket know as naturally as a heartbeat: get out of the way, don’t block the straws, don’t force your sight on someone. No one is here for that.
It was between dodging a man making a play for the stirrer sticks and refreshing Instagram that I noticed two ears poking up from a black purse. A set of whiskers. The unmistakable tidy typeface beneath a white-stamped spade. “Oh my god,” I said, cutting through the Jack Johnson Muzak and a dozen conversations about the weather forecast. “I love your purse.”
Its owner's glance leapt up at me as if struck by traffic — she’d been caught mid-whimsy -- but softened when she saw me, the polka-dot headband and cat brooch, the saddle-shaped leather purse I held at my hip. I was not mocking her, not calling her out. I saw her. “Isn’t it adorable?” She said, demonstrating the cat face flap that opened to hold her precious everyday possessions.
“It’s Kate Spade, right?” I said, because obviously. Every season, the company bearing Kate Spade’s name trotted out a cavalcade of themed bags, cell-phone cases, watches and passport holders designed to look like other things. Fun things. Beautiful things. Flamingos. Taco trucks. Camels. Piñatas. A VW bus. A vintage typewriter. Lovely textile creations with creative clasps that stopped the masses in their tracks with the question — is that a purse? “Did you see the cactus she came out with last year?” I asked.
“The one that looked like it was a potted plant?”
“Yes! That’s my Kate Spade. How do you say no to a potted cactus?”
My quiche came up, and her husband tugged her ahead in the line. We said goodbye and exchanged the sacred blessing: “Enjoy your bag!” I returned to my car and caught a dumb grin in the rear-view mirror. Like a Kate Spade bag made clear, joy is a tough thing to contain.
The cactus was my first Kate Spade purse after years of pinning her designs to my Pinterest boards. All of the past tote-able strawberries and cakes (and a particularly amazing strawberry cake) were too expensive to justify: the By The Pool 3D Pineapple will set you back $398; the Checking In 3D Swan Pool Float is on sale for $239. I built my collection inspired by these dream accessories, the flotsam of everyday drudgery transformed into mementos of places we missed, vacations we vowed to take, women we thought we’d become. I found substitutes. Betsey Johnson made gaudier knock-offs I could combine Macy’s coupons to purchase, and ModCloth often carried novelty bags to match their print dresses and shirt patterns. Kate Spade was the actualization of a style I began to adopt in my late twenties, as I circled back to the vintage-hinted outfits and theme-y bags I loved when I was young, before the desperation to survive ‘90s adolescence stuffed me into GAP, Old Navy and Aeropostale.
When I spotted the Kate Spade Scenic Route Cactus Purse from Seattle’s Southcenter Nordstrom escalator, it was spring 2017. I was eating more, drinking more, reaching for my credit card until it cracked. The west coast was studying North Korean missile range patterns. I was free-falling in “fuck it.”
I floated past the Clinique lab coats and Jimmy Choos, the ugly stepsisters to my Cinderella. I picked up the striped pot, holding a wood-painted prickly pear sprouting soft pink leather blossoms. It grew from a bed of silver gravel glitter, a nod to the year I spent living in Tucson, learning to keep our house’s succulents and barrel cactus and bougainvillea alive. The last time I fell in love this fast, I was holding a baby kitten that grew up into my 14-year-old, comically overweight, incontinent cat. I stood, cradling the treasure in my arms, tethered by a security tag.
My mom, some paces behind me, flipped up the price tag and laughed, then when I didn’t join in, gave me the side-eye. “Really?”
“Excuse me,” I called out to a sales associate, “I want this, please.”
It wasn’t on sale; it had only been out on the shelf for a day. It cost more than my monthly car payment. Khloe, as I christened her, was a privileged, impractical, ridiculous purchase that I could not defend on any grounds beyond “she’s perfect.” I rang it up on my store card and folded the receipt deep, deep into the crevices of the shopping bag.
The week after I accepted Khloe and my freshly inflated Nordstrom credit card balance into my life, I couldn’t hide by the stirry-sticks. I could not buy a bag of groceries or walk through the parking lot without someone wanting to know, “is that a purse?” My boss had to take a selfie with it. So did a stranger at Sweet Tomatoes.
I wear loud dress prints and the occasional fanciful hat. I am used to the intermittent “love your outfit” and the rare “well that’s tacky” (yes, I’m looking at you, lady at the Portland Farmer’s Market). But never had the enthusiasm been so effusive, so interactive, so universal. The jolt of happiness I felt when her gravel glitter caught my eye while I was hammering away at an Excel spreadsheet, this hint that the office wasn’t the entire universe, that in a few hours I’d grab her leather strap and go out into a world of possibilities, it was infectious. It lifted me, if only a few precious inches, from 2017’s despair.
“It’s Kate Spade, right?” her admirers guessed. And more than once, “well I like that it doesn’t look, like, you know. One of those basic bitch Kate Spade bags.”
The bag they refer to is the iconic structured Kate Spade purse, the one occasionally accented with a bow for the basic bitch that’s feeling adventurous. At Racked, a Wall Street Journal fashion reporter called the brand “cheesy,” on par with the Instagram clichés of Starbucks and Uggs. Just as the Pumpkin Spice Latte became shorthand for undercutting grown women’s enthusiasm, so did the Kate Spade mid-market purses, aimed at the working thirtysomething on a sliding eccentricity scale. When I went to leave a glowing review about my purse online (just in case anyone out there was on the fence about The Best Bag Ever Made), the Scenic Route line reaction was not enthusiastic.
Why is everything so tacky?
Cheesy, basic, tacky, Mom. The vitriol for women and their interests comes in a variety of flavors, a new set of descriptors we inherit as we pass from one decade to the next. Another signal to put down the cute clasped lemon slice, back away, shut up. Those pressures, subtle and omnipresent, can be impossible to shut out.
The world mourned the news that Kate Spade was discovered dead in her apartment on June 5, 2018 from apparent suicide. She was only 55. The woman who gave her name to the company’s mantra, “quick and curious and playful and strong,” was no longer part of its day-to-day operations at the time of her death. She sold her company to Neiman Marcus in 2007, which sold it to Coach last year. But the corporate brand-owner can never separate Spade’s personality and style from the legacy of her look, one commandeered by all of us drawn to her slivers of light. No matter how many billions of dollars and shares change hands, she gave us herself; she introduced us to our brighter selves. To each other. And the loss of that spirit is a stinging, echoing sucker-punch.
Kate Spade isn’t a brand for everyone. No designer is; but to the women like me, she is aspirational not for status or money or power, but for the dream of a self that used fashion as short story. In my story, fashion is humor. Pairing patterns and pieces together to announce what we find lovely in the world, what makes us smile in a day that’s indistinguishable from many others. Whether an understated leather bow or a fully rendered potted cactus, Kate Spade’s portable, wearable creations are practical reminders of impracticality and irreverence. They are a dogwhistle of sincerity in a culture held hostage by cynicism, turning those fleeting interactions into recognition. Life is short, and it is only getting harder, and even the wealthiest and most successful among us can’t escape its sorrows.
Embrace the color, the texture, the nod. The laugh.
Enjoy your bag.
If you or someone you know needs help, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.
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