Kate Spade book author, Elyce Arons, coming to KC for Halls Kansas City event
.jpg "Kate Spade’s best friend and business partner, Elyce Arons, is coming to Kansas City in September for an event hosted at Halls Kansas City in Crown Center. Arons’ new book, “We Just Might Make It After All,” details how the women built not one but two fashion empires.")
Halls Kansas City, the luxury department store in Crown Center, had a long relationship with designer Kate Spade, the Kansas City native who built a fashion empire that bore her name.
Halls was one of the first retailers in town to carry Spade’s handbag line — six styles in the first collection — when it launched in 1993.
Fans who met her at Halls special events found her to be charming, sophisticated and witty.
When Spade took her life in 2018 at age 55, then-CEO and president of Halls, Kelly Cole, said the former KU student and 1981 graduate of St. Teresa’s Academy was a friend to him and many of the store’s associates.
In the hours after she died, Halls sold out of many items from Frances Valentine, the second fashion brand Spade founded a decade after selling Kate Spade New York. Halls is the line’s exclusive retailer in Kansas City.
Her best friend Elyce Arons, the Kansas farm girl Spade met when they lived in the same dorm at KU, has written a book about their relationship entitled “We Might Just Make It After All.”
It details their two years at KU, how they built Kate Spade New York into an international phenomenon and how they followed up that success with Frances Valentine 10 years after they sold Kate Spade.
Arons still runs Frances Valentine as CEO. Over the next few months she will make stops across the country to talk to fans about the book and the line.
She will appear at a trunk show and book signing from 4 to 6 pm. Sept. 25 at the Halls Fall Style Event.
In an interview with The Star, Arons said some people to this day do not realize that Spade co-founded Frances Valentine, a brand that stayed true to the colorful, playful spirit that infused Kate Spade New York.
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