Kate Spade friend and business partner takes ‘walk down memory lane’ in new book
Elyce Arons grew up on a 1,500-acre cattle ranch north of Wichita in one of those house-divided families of Kansas and K-State fans.
When she was in high school her dad, a cattle rancher and K-State graduate, tried to win her to his side.
So one autumn weekend he took her to a KU-KSU football game — in Lawrence, inexplicably — where he hoped his daughter would cheer for the Wildcats.
But on that beautiful sunny day she fell in love with KU’s picturesque campus on a hill where, she recalls, “all the guys were cute and all the girls were adorable.” She decided to study journalism there. Score one for KU.
In mid-August 1981, her dad packed her things in his red Cutlass Supreme and drove her back to Lawrence to Gertrude Sellards Pearson Hall, an all-girls dorm known as GSP.
Frat boys waited on the sidewalk to carry her stuff inside. She got a welcome bag, too, with Wella Balsam shampoo, toiletries and Virginia Slims cigarettes.
KU in the ‘80s. It was a different era.
Later that afternoon in the dorm, Arons met the person who would lovingly, and kind of annoyingly, call her “Jethro” the rest of her life.
She was fellow freshman and journalism major Katy Brosnahan, a petite, pretty Catholic school girl from Kansas City with porcelain skin, shiny dark brown hair and a spray of freckles across her upturned nose. She was handbook preppy in polo shirts and Bass Weejuns loafers.
The world later came to know her as Kate Spade as these former KU students built two fashion empires together — Kate Spade, which they sold in 2006, and Frances Valentine, the colorful, vintage-inspired label they founded in 2016 and Arons still runs as CEO.
Frances Valentine was just getting off the ground when, on June 5, 2018, Spade took her own life in her New York Park Avenue condominium.
Four days after she died, Arons walked into that apartment to retrieve clothes she had left in her best friend’s closet.
The air conditioning was off, the drapes closed, the air “stale and still.” When Spade was alive she kept the lights on 24/7 and the curtains open to let the sunshine in. In the bedroom, where Spade died, pieces of paper from the medics littered the floor.
Arons felt like her friend, famous for her pranks, would suddenly appear.
But she was gone.
Arons shares stories of their nearly 40-year friendship and meteoric rise in the fashion world in her book, “We Just Might Make It After All,” out today.
It’s part business primer — how do you start an iconic company from scratch? — and part diary.
“Dear Diary, today I hugged Emilio Estevez.”
“It’s funny, if I were handed a crystal ball in that moment and could have foreseen what the future would hold for the both of us, it would have seemed unbelievable, like some impossibly crazy Hollywood production dreamed up by a team of screenwriters,” Arons writes of meeting Spade at GSP.
Arons chose to focus on how Spade lived rather than how she died.
One of the world’s most iconic fashion names used to sling pizza in Lawrence.
“For myself, it was a really good walk down memory lane, really cathartic in a way,” Arons told The Star. “And I wanted to honor Katy and her legacy ... because I feel like so many people remember her because of her being gone. And I want them to remember her how she lived.
“She was such a shy person that most people didn’t really get to know who she was. She was gracious and funny, she was the funniest person I’ve ever met, honest to God.
“So I wanted to tell our best-friendship story for anybody who wants to read a good book during this chaotic world we’re living in and remember that there are good, happy people out there, because most of us are still good and happy people ... and for young women to know that they can do this.”
At the time of her death Spade and her husband and business partner, Andy Spade, were separated and living apart. Tabloids latched onto the marital discord angle and reported that Spade left a note for their daughter, Frances Beatrix, that reportedly said she was not to blame for her mother’s death.
So yes, there is some setting-the-record-straight going on here, Arons said. She controls this narrative. So readers should not expect the answer to why Spade did what she did.
The Spades, she writes, loved each other to the ends of the earth.
Arons and Spade were half of the four-person team that founded Kate Spade — their foursome also included Andy Spade and friend Pamela Bell. All Midwesterners, Arons points out.
“Over the years, really since we sold Kate Spade and since we started Frances Valentine, people have said, ‘Oh, you should write a book, you should write a book,’” Arons said.
“And about two years ago my former business partner, Pamela Bell, my husband Andy (Arons) and I were all sitting outside one day and we were doubled over laughing at some of the stories. And my husband said, ‘You have to write this book.’ And I said, ‘I’m too busy, I’m too busy at work.’
“And he said, ‘If you don’t do it now, you’re never going to do it. You’re going to get busier and you’re going to forget things.’
“So I started on my phone, on my notes section, i just started writing down the titles of stories that I remembered so well.
“And then I started looking back at my past calendars because I kept all of my hard calendars and my spiral notebooks from all the years … I have them in tubs in my basement.
“And then other things. I’d see a photo and another story came back to me. And then I talked to Andy Spade several times ... I spent hours talking to Pamela Bell. And all of the other things just came back to me.”
Arons is planning a trip to Lawrence in the fall.
KU’s frat boys and poison ivy
The city girl from the private all-girls school and the homebody farm girl who owned a Palomino horse named Honey were both financial-aid students and had suffered heartache as little girls. Arons lost a sister to cancer and Spade’s parents divorced.
Trauma bonded them quickly.
“I think it’s rooted in those early years together,” said Arons. “We were both broke a lot. We depended on each other for laughter and consolation with boyfriends and what had happened in our past.
“And from then on, it was all the other stuff. We made each other laugh so much. We trusted each other. I knew if I told her anything she would never tell another person and she knew to trust me. And you know, that’s hard to find …”
Anyone who went to KU in the pre-Larry Brown 1980s will recognize the KU Arons describes — GSP girls traveling in packs to frat parties and soap-opera-loving students rushing home to watch “All My Children” and “General Hospital” in the afternoon.
Preppy Spade loved Susan Lucci’s character, Erica Kane — the big hair, the makeup, the glamorous clothes.
“Like most people in my generation, college at that time, especially state university, was just a blast,” Arons said. “I went to every football game, I went to every basketball game. And coming from a farm, it was a whole new life. I was, for the first time, able to make my own schedule.
“I loved every minute of it. If we wanted to go to The Wheel after class, we went to The Wheel after class. We’d go to dollar pitcher nights there. We went to The Mad Hatter, Gammons. And Katy and I ended up working at Pyramid Pizza, which (was) right underneath The Wheel.
“The Hawk had the best sandwiches. ... We got to see The Go-Gos and The Bangles at The Opera House.
“I loved every single minute of every single day there. From the second my dad dropped me off at school, college was great, KU was great.”
Well, not so great on the night the two of them went to a frat party at Potter Lake on campus. With no bathroom close by, they squatted in the dark to relieve themselves.
Sadly for them, they urinated on poison ivy.
They scratched themselves “south of the border” for two weeks, Arons writes.
She and Spade also shared an obsessive affection for Mary Tyler Moore and her TV sitcom, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” which ran for seven seasons in the 1970s. Moore played single gal Mary Richards, a producer at the fictional Minneapolis television station WJM.
Spade and Arons were hardly the only young women inspired by TV’s glamorous career woman. At that time in the real world, “the place for women was not in men’s offices unless they were a secretary,” said Arons. “So to have someone who was a single woman, without a boyfriend, without a fiance, without a husband ...
“We grew up where we were the subservient women to all the strong men and Mary was different. She was the strong female. But also she was funny and she was self-deprecating and she was humble, was confident and she looked great.”
The title of Arons’ book is a play on the “you’re gonna make it after all” lyric from the show’s famous theme song, “Love Is All Around.”
“We got to meet her in person and she was lovely. Just what you’d expect,” Arons said.. “More like a friend than a celebrity once I got over the initial not being able to talk.”
From the Arizona desert to glittery NYC
Arons and Spade spent two years at KU — Spade pledged Kappa Kappa Gamma, Arons was a Chi Omega — before they transferred to Arizona State University.
Spade’s sister, Missy, and her family lived outside Scottsdale. And as it turned out, the dry desert air was good for Spade’s allergies.
It was good for her love life, too. She and Andy Spade met at work, a preppy clothing store.
“He was an ASU student ... whom she billed as a funny, handsome triathlete,” Arons writes. “She would come home from work and it was ‘Andy this’ and ‘Andy that.’”
When their boss, Mike Carter, decided to open his own clothing store, Katy and Andy went with him.
“His passion and knowledge of clothing and the great brands of that era really had a major impact on both of them,” Arons writes. “They learned everything about fabrics, thread counts, various kinds of wool for men’s suiting ... it was the spark that would later ignite Katy and Andy’s interest in the fashion business.”
In Arizona, Arons, Katy and Andy became a tight, platonic threesome. Sometimes, a fourth member would join them — David Spade, Andy’s brother.
David was two years younger than Arons, so she dismissed him as dating material. Just friends.
With graduation looming, Arons and Spade, both fans of fashion and vintage clothing, talked of some day owning their own store like their friend Mike Carter.
Arons’ dream always involved moving to New York City and working at a fashion magazine — maybe Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar — or in TV news.
After they graduated in December 1985, Arons moved to New York to join her older sister, Willow, who had moved there from Kansas to study at the Joffrey Ballet School before a knee injury scuttled those plans.
Spade headed to Europe for a vacation, alone.
When she returned, she moved to New York, first living with Arons, later with Andy.
New York was in the throes of its “greed is good” era, just like in Oliver Stone’s 1987 movie, “Wall Street,” where predatory, immoral stockbroker Gordon Gekko will betray anyone to make a buck.
David Spade invited them into the world of “Saturday Night Live” when he started working there in 1990. “He was so sweet,” Arons said. “He always asked us to the show or the dress rehearsal and often times we got to go to the after-party, so that was pretty cool.”
Arons clocked time watching celebrities at the bar where her sister worked. On any given night Liza Minnelli, Andy Warhol, Matt Dillon, Christopher Walken or Cher would pop in.
The boyfriend of one of the servers was a handsome bartender with a tough-guy Jersey accent who got an acting gig for a new TV show called “Moonlighting.”
It was Bruce Willis.
Kate Spade, female British spy?
When Spade returned from Europe, she temporarily moved in with Arons and her roommates in their shoebox-small apartment. She landed a temp job at Mademoiselle magazine on her second day in town, eventually working her way up to fashion editor.
Arons, meanwhile, landed public relations jobs with women’s clothing brand JG Hook and the French fashion house, Marithe Francois Girbaud.
They eventually talked Andy, who was still in Arizona making a name for himself in advertising, into moving to New York, telling him “advertising is based in New York!”
His first home with Spade was a fifth-floor walk-up in west Soho with a quirk: artist Roy Lichtenstein had painted the baseboards in his signature primary color palette.
Arons writes of a phone call she got from Katy and Andy in June 1992.
“Elyce! We think we’re ready to go into the handbag business!” Andy told her.
Over the years the two women had talked of someday going into business together.
But Andy wasn’t part of that plan.
As Arons writes, Andy laid out the plan to design beautiful, affordable purses for women who couldn’t afford luxury brands.
Their handbags would be architectural in shape, sleek and spare of overwrought ornamentation.
Andy offered to pay the start-up costs out of his advertising salary.
Katy was on the call, too.
“Well, Jethro, whaddya say?” she asked Arons.
Silence.
And then ...
“I’m in,” Arons told her.
But what to name the company?
Andy, the copywriting, branding brains of the team, suggested combining Katy’s first name with his last name, though they were not married at the time.
And “Katy” would become “Kate” because he “liked the rhythm of two, one-syllable words together,” Arons writes.
Kate Spade “could be your best girlfriend from high school, a famous Broadway star or a female British spy,” she writes. “Katy liked it a lot, too, but from the start, her shyness made her cautious.
“’Don’t expect me to be Kate Spade!’ she said when we first agreed on the name, and many times after that.”
When they called Spade’s mom to tell her the news, she asked, “Does this mean you’re finally getting married?”
Just three years after they launched the brand, Spade won the first of her two Council of Fashion Designers of America awards, a Perry Ellis Award for New Fashion Talent. CFDA awards are the Oscars of fashion.
“Skeptics be dammed,” fashion editor Linda Wells wrote in tribute. “Kate Spade’s bags are, well, maybe not genius, but very, very, clever. They hold a lot of stuff, and they make their owners feel a little jauntier, a little happier just for carrying such a snappy thing.”
In 1997, Spade was named CFDA’s Accessory Designer of the Year.
“I remember her on the phone and she’s looking at Pamela and me from her desk and she put down the phone and said, ‘We’ve been nominated!’ And then, ‘Oh my God,’” Arons said.
“All of a sudden Katy froze. It came to her that, ‘Oh my God, if I win, I’m going to have to get up in front of all those people and make a speech.’”
A new line is born
To this day, Arons knows that some people still believe Spade remains involved with Kate Spade the company.
So many people, she said, don’t remember that she’s gone.
“I think there are American brands that are part of our culture and I think that’s one of them,” she said. “And hopefully Frances Valentine will become that, too. There’s not as much brand awareness of Frances Valentine, people are like wait, what, who’s Frances and what is it?”
The best friends launched Frances Valentine 10 years after they sold Kate Spade. The name Frances comes from Spade’s father’s side of the family; Valentine, her mother’s side.
Arons is CEO of the company. “Andy (Spade) is still my business partner, but he has not been involved with the business since we lost Katy,” she said.
When they began, they knew they wanted to return to their handbag roots. “And Katy, after designing all the shoes at Kate Spade, really had this love for shoes, too,” said Arons.
“So we thought we’ll start out with this accessories brand. And in between Kate Spade and Frances Valentine we had several years where we, for the first time in a long time, got to be consumers of other designers and other brands.
“And I remember we were going out shopping one time and I really wanted to find a great pair of shoes. And I found a pair of shoes I loved. They were orange patent leather and they were adorable and I loved them.
“And I turned them over and they were $1,200. I was like, ‘Oh, I can’t spend $1,200 on a pair of shoes. I just can’t do it.’
“We started talking about that and we know how to make and design shoes and we said we can design a beautifully crafted pair of shoes that are chic and cool and are made to last and they don’t have to be $1,200. They can be $400. And that’s still expensive for a pair of shoes, but it’s not $1,200.”
When Spade died, Frances Valentine was still only selling handbags and shoes, “and I wanted to do something as a tribute to her that was special,” said Arons.
“So we pulled two of her favorite vintage pieces. One was a caftan that she wore on every vacation we’d ever taken together. The other was a sweater, this embroidered sweater that we had bought decades before.
“And we made those two pieces and our customers loved them. They sold out immediately. We remade them, remade them again, and then people started asking us for all of the pieces we were using to style our campaigns, which were our vintage pieces.
“And one was an orange swing coat and they were like, ‘Where can I get that?’ And we were like, ‘OK, guess we gotta make a swing coat.’
“And then they were like, ‘What pants should I wear with that?’ I would wear cigarette pants with it. So I was like, ‘OK, we have to make a pair of cigarette pants, too.’ So cut to we start adding all these things and this little tribute that was called Love, Katy, became our apparel collection.
“What happened as kind of a gesture and a nice tribute to her is now 60% of our business, our company. So I feel like she’s still inspiring us every day.”
‘A grief so deep’
Arons attended Spade’s funeral at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish Redemptorist Church in Kansas City, where women among the 1,000 or so mourners carried Kate Spade purses and the service began with the singing of “The First Noel” — because Spade was born on Christmas Eve and her middle name was Noel.
“I just feel like her vocation was to fill the world with beautiful things,” said one mourner that day.
Arons doesn’t bring up how she found out about her friend’s death until the epilogue, page 285 out of 287, where she describes sitting alone at her desk at Frances Valentine just after 9 a.m. when she got a call from Spade’s assistant, Dallas, who wanted to make sure Arons was sitting down.
He said Katy had taken her own life.
Arons let out “a cry of distress from grief so deep that I barely remember what happened next,” she writes.
Just the day before they had talked about Katy’s plans to spend the summer in Napa, which her family had done for years.
Arons reveals that she had talked often with Spade about her struggle with depression, which she knew she had been dealing with the last few years of her life.
Spade was seeking help with specialists, “and we understood the goal was to mitigate the times Katy was carrying that deep sadness which she couldn’t seem to shake and had weighed heavily on her in recent years,” writes Arons.
“Most of the time she was herself and we spent our days together as usual working or socializing. We had discussed the suicide of celebrities in the past and she had said definitely to me, ‘I would never, ever do that.’”
She writes that her best friend was highly sensitive and “felt things more deeply than most. But I know for sure she was not so upset about how many pairs of shoes we sold that she would take her own life.
“We all have dark moments and periods. In one of those moments, she lost hope.”
“I looked back because you want to find something that you could have done better or could have done differently,” Arons said. “And I can’t think of what it is other than, just, if you have someone who’s in trouble ... if you think your friend’s in trouble or your relative, get them help and just try to spend as much time with them as possible.
“And again, there were no signs to me. It’s one of those things that I just keep looking back and it’s hard to figure out what any of us could have done differently.”
After Spade died, Arons wanted to have something of her best friend’s to keep.
“And, um, it was her toothbrush cup,” she said.
“I know this sounds silly. It had her initials on it ... it was in the trash and I just grabbed it on my way out of the apartment because I wanted something that she touched every day.
“And it’s in my bathroom, because it’s important to me.”
This story was originally published June 17, 2025 at 11:01 AM.
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