The tragic news of Kate Spade’s death got me thinking about my one, memorable encounter with the designer: in 2003, I carried a Kate Spade knockoff bag to a Kate Spade interview.
As a young female reporter living in New York City at that time, Spade’s bags represented class, sophistication, grown-up-ness, joie de vivre, and everything that I was pretending to possess. I knew nothing about fashion and was not that interested in it, and well-intentioned friends had tried to stage interventions about my style. One kind, older, gay male colleague at a previous journalism internship had taken me aside about the silk scarves I regularly wore and said to me, in the gentlest way, “You kind of look like a flight attendant, Rebecca.” I had read those dress-for-the-job-you-want stories in women’s magazines, and I was trying, dammit, while earning about $50,000 a year as a general-assignment reporter at Time magazine and living in Queens. Part of trying was riding the subway to Chinatown and buying a pretty, boxy, black nylon tote that looked identical to ones I’d seen stylish Manhattan women carrying, but for $20 instead of the $300 or so that they were going for at Macy’s.
One day I got a spur-of-the-moment assignment to interview Spade for a Time story. Surely, a writer who was actually qualified to interview a fashion mogul had fallen through at the last moment, so there I was, ascending the steps to Spade’s office with my tape recorder and reporter’s notebook tucked into the Kate Spade knockoff tote that I had bought a few months earlier. I didn’t remember I was carrying the bag until a receptionist who was summoning Spade for the interview glanced at it and squinted, probably taking in the janky stitching. Time froze briefly, as I prayed for the earth beneath this stylishly appointed Soho loft to open and swallow me, along with the real Kate Spade clutches and totes that were arrayed neatly around us.
Horrified, I quickly took off my trench coat, slung it over my arm to conceal the fake bag, and sat that way for my entire one-hour interview with Spade. Sadly, I remember little of our conversation, so fixated was I on concealing from her the evidence of my fraudulence. I do remember that Spade’s skin was luminous, her outfit impeccable, and that she seemed nice and really, really smart. Apparently, according to the story I wrote, Spade talked to me about the whimsical bags in her mother’s Kansas City closet that inspired her, and about how people had warned her away from the vicious fashion industry because she was too nice a girl. I also remember that Spade kept discreetly tilting her head, trying to see whatever I was concealing underneath my trench coat.
After the interview, I filed my story and shared the tale of my fashion faux pas with a guy who I had just started dating. A few days later, a Macy’s package was waiting on the steps of my walk-up. The guy had bought me a real Kate Spade bag, a bright red, boxy, little nylon tote. It was too much money for a man to spend on a woman he’d known just a few weeks, in my skeptical opinion—maybe he was a serial killer with great taste in accessories? But I felt, in language I didn’t yet have at the time, seen. I was classy, sophisticated, and grown up. I wasn’t a fraud—I was authentic. I was just authentically broke.
I carried that beautiful bag for years, and retired it not long ago because I had destroyed it with everyday use, like some sort of Velveteen Rabbit luxury object that is loved too hard. In 2005, I married the man who bought me that bag and, to this day, he is still great at giving gifts.
Fashion is often about a myth we tell women: that love and success are easily had, just a perfect handbag away. They aren’t, of course, for any of us. But I did so love my first Kate Spade bag, and I was happy to bask in the story it let me tell about myself.
