Fashion Designer Kate Spade Dead in Apparent Suicide

New York fashion designer Kate Spade was found hanged in her Park Avenue apartment Tuesday morning in an apparent suicide, law enforcement officials said. The 55-year-old left a note at the scene and was found by housekeeping about 10:20am, per the AP. It's not clear how long she had been dead. The medical examiner will perform an autopsy. The officials said she was found with a red scarf around her neck attached to a doorknob. Spade created a line of sleek handbags in the early 1990s that created a smash. Her company, Kate Spade New York, has over 140 retail shops and outlet stores across the US and more than 175 shops internationally.

CBS reports that Spade was born Katherine Brosnahan in Kansas City in 1962. She went on to meet husband and future business partner Andy Spade (the brother of actor David Spade) at Arizona State University, notes TMZ. After working at Mademoiselle magazine in the 1980s, she launched Kate Spate Handbags with Andy Spade in 1993, and they married in 1994. 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. In 2017, Coach bought the brand for $2.4 billion. Spade and her husband started a new handbag company a few years ago, Frances Valentine, named after their daughter, who was born in 2005. And she changed her name to Katherine Noel Frances Valentine Brosnahan Spade, she said in an NPR interview this year.

Gone too soon

So sad to hear