We Might Just Make It After All by Elyce Arons: I didn't believe it when I heard that my best friend Kate Spade was dead - the REAL woman behind the iconic brand is revealed by the person who knew her best

Accessories designer Kate Spade and her best friend and business partner of 40 years Elyce Arons might have been serious businesswomen – they built Kate’s namesake multi-billion-dollar brand together from nothing – but they liked pulling pranks on each other, too.

So when Elyce learnt one morning in June 2018 that Kate been found hanged in her apartment, her first thought was that she was pranking her. She had been talking to Kate on the phone only the day before, after all.

‘The entire world believed Kate Spade was gone, but there was a part of me that fleetingly hoped her suicide was her most elaborate, epic prank yet,’ Elyce writes in the prologue to her memoir.

Elyce realised Kate’s suicide was not a prank only when she visited Kate’s apartment four days after her death to perform that ritual of best-friendship many women will recognise all too well – collecting some of her clothes from Kate’s wardrobe.

When moths flew out of the wardrobe at her, Elyce realised Kate was really gone – her best friend would never have let moths get to the clothes, but her apartment had become sauna-like in its heat during those four days, and the moths had profited.

Despite it beginning with a prologue that recounts the immediate aftermath of Kate’s death, you shouldn’t expect a book that delves voyeuristically into the ‘why’ of Kate’s suicide. This is the story of what came before that (‘when there was no hint of what she would suffer later,’ Elyce says), a story of the enduring power of female friendship, topped off with a big dollop of Nineties New York glamour.

Elyce and Kate met for the first time at the University of Kansas in 1981. They came from very different backgrounds but opposites attract – after relieving themselves outside during a party by a lake, Kate developed a rash from poison ivy, and, as a preppy ‘city girl’ with no idea what the rash was, sought advice from country girl Elyce. Elyce had the same rash and, having grown up on a farm in Kansas, explained that it was from poison ivy and nothing to worry about.

They took it in turns each evening to dab each other’s backsides with cotton balls dipped in calamine lotion. Unsurprisingly, the experience bonded them.

Elyce soon broke the Midwestern code of emotional reticence and confided in Kate about the death of her teenage sister to bone cancer. Kate promised not to share this ‘secret’ and Elyce has since returned the favour – she has said in interviews that she reveals nothing in the book that Kate ever told her to keep secret.

Post-graduation, the two landed jobs in New York – Elyce in marketing for a denim brand and Kate at prestigious fashion magazine Mademoiselle. Kate would go on to spend six years there, eventually becoming a senior fashion editor and head of accessories – the role that allowed her to see the gap in the market for her future brand.

New York in the late Eighties was of course glamorous for some, but for Kate and Elyce it was more gritty: rats in their apartments, tricky bosses, and being groped while waitressing at The China Club.

In early 1993, Elyce and Kate, along with hair accessories entrepreneur Pamela Bell (whom they met by chance when they shared a summer house) and Kate’s future husband Andy Spade, established the brand that would make them famous and redefine the accessories industry forever.

Kate made the first handbag samples out of cardboard and Sellotape in her stifling apartment and they ran around the Garment District in search of factories.

What becomes clear is that Kate was a deeply private person – she never wanted to be the face of the brand, despite the fact it bore her name. Well, quasi-bore her name. Kate’s real name, and the one Elyce uses in the book, was Katy.

And at the time of naming the brand, she was still Katy Brosnahan, not yet married to Andy Spade. They chose the name because they thought its monosyllabic simplicity denoted aspiration yet was somehow endearingly familiar, too – not because they foresaw it would rocket not just the brand but Kate herself to fame.

As the brand’s profile grew (in 1998, just five years after its founding, sales totalled $27 million) Kate didn’t relish the limelight she, as an individual, had unintentionally acquired. She adored meeting customers (and Princess Diana at the 1995 CFDA Fashion Awards, as Elyce recounts in the book) but the back-to-back international tours she had to take as the ‘face of the brand’ were relentless.

Where did Kate the brand end and Kate the person begin? (‘Don’t expect me to be Kate Spade!’ Elyce quotes Kate as saying). It’s an identity struggle other famous founders of our time – Jo Malone, Bobbi Brown – have faced.

When Elyce and Kate sold a 56 per cent stake in the company to the department store group Neiman Marcus in 1999 (for a cool $33.6 million, but Elyce, even more coolly, never quotes these figures in the book) Kate lost some creative control over the brand that bore her name, and when they sold the entire company in 2006 – just 21 months after her daughter was born – Kate lost the right to use her name to promote other businesses she might launch in the future.

This didn’t stop her and Elyce, though – together they launched another accessories brand, Frances Valentine, in 2016.

Ask most American women and they’ll remember their first Kate Spade. Buying a Kate Spade bag in the Nineties and Noughties was a milestone moment.

It was more than a bag – buying a Kate Spade was a moment of independence, something you bought with your first big pay cheque, or to celebrate an achievement. Kate saw herself in the customers – she too had lived pay cheque to pay cheque and come out on the other side. The trouble was, the bags were so jubilant and whimsical in design that people assumed the woman who designed them was unfailingly so too.

Kate Spade is a mythical figure, a figment of public imagination. The real person, Katy Brosnahan, had demons. Elyce doesn’t detail the exact nature of these – she says she knew of the depression with which Kate had been dealing in the years preceding her death and that she was receiving help, but that, when Kate heard of a celebrity suicide, she had always said she would ‘never do that’.

Since Kate’s death, much public reaction has been based on a similar confusion – ‘she had a daughter and had founded a multi-billion-dollar business – so why did she do it, and so unexpectedly?’

Those seeking a ‘tell all’ answer to this question won’t find it here – and the book is all the better for it. Depression is inexplicable, and Elyce doesn’t try to explain it. Rather, this is a homage to the friendship of a lifetime.

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