Amy Larocca Does Some Serious Spade Work

Here are my favorite five little bits in the profile of Kate and Andy Spade in New York magazine. I find the Spades actually kind of charming and even so this story is making me laugh and laugh. It’s like taking a big branding-scented bath in word association.

1. The Spades took Bea to Disneyland for the first time at the end of January. A few days after they got home, Andy had a party at Partners & Spade to celebrate the release of the first two of six books of photographs he had taken with his iPhone.

2. It is instead a trip inside Spade’s peripatetic mind, and, therefore, a helpful place to begin understanding why so many men in this city have been wandering around in flannel shirts and Red Wing boots, taking their meals in restaurants with walls covered in a mishmash of antlers and art.

3. The Spades are from the Midwest. They like to get together with their old friends and stay up late. They like things to be classic and they like the color Kelly green. They came to the city, but they didn’t set about erasing the people they were before they got here, and they still have that outsider’s endless thrill of how cool is this art gallery? How great is this weird smelly record store?

4. “If you look at everything that was going on in fashion at that time,” Andy says now, “there was not a voice that just said hi or hello. There just wasn’t a lot out there that looked real. But there’s something great about suburbia. There’s something great about innocence. A Peter Pan collar is sexier than a bustier.”

5. If anything, they’ve often worked on transporting city folk beyond the five boroughs-and not to Europe either. Tierney Gearon photographed the company’s second ad campaign, which featured a good-looking (but not scarily so) family in the yard of their big (but not huge) white clapboard house. “It was being in the backyard and throwing your kid up in the air, and the kid is wearing a Halloween costume,” Andy says. “I mean, what’s better than that? Being on a yacht is definitely not any better than that.”