It’s too soon to know what led Kate Spade to take her life — if we’ll ever really know — but one thing’s clear: Aside from Hollywood, no business is as seductive and brutish, as cruel and transactional as fashion.
Even the people who inhabit this world cannot live up to it. Fashion has a long list of casualties — most recently the stylist Isabella Blow, who committed suicide in 2007, and designer Alexander McQueen, who hung himself in 2010.
“Fashion is evil,” Tom Ford told The Financial Times in 2016. “You stay out for very long and people forget who you are. And your name loses power.”
“Fashion does not take care of its people,” Andre Leon Talley told the New York Times last month. Yet Talley — who claims to be broke and friendless, dropped by former BFFs Anna Wintour and Miuccia Prada — doesn’t seem to get the irony here.
For decades, Talley made the average American woman feel less-than on a monthly basis while encouraging rampant consumerism and utter banality. Here’s what he told Vogue.com about packing for Kim and Kanye’s wedding in Paris: “Wardrobe is pivotal to one’s personal happiness on any trip,” he said. “I spent Sunday afternoon pulling out from a storage room two vintage Valentino couture caftans I wore to his farewell ceremonies in Rome in 2007 — I had discussed that with Kim and thought she would love that.”
Or take this vignette from Tim Gunn’s book “Gunn’s Golden Rules,” in which he describes reporting for sound check at the New York Public Library in 2006, only to learn co-panelist Talley was MIA.
“When we return to the green room, we see that someone has spread a translucent barber’s bib over Andre and he’s reclining, his arms at his sides. He’s being fed grapes and cubes of cheese one by one, like a bird in a nest.”
And so a grown man who once found such obeisance acceptable can’t believe he’s been left to rot in upstate New York.
“One day you’re in, the next — you’re out!” has been the catchphrase for “Project Runway” since its inception. Is this sentiment any less true because it’s packaged in a reality show?
In 2014, A-list stylist L’Wren Scott committed suicide in a $5.6 million Chelsea apartment, hanging herself with a scarf tied to a doorknob.
“I always say luxury is a state of mind,” Scott told The Sunday Times of London the year before her death. “It’s legroom, it’s a beautiful view, it’s great food at a great restaurant you’ve discovered because you obsessively read Zagat, as I do.”
Scott presented herself as a true elite, profiled in glossy magazines as stylist to Nicole Kidman and girlfriend of Mick Jagger. In reality, Jagger had reportedly dumped Scott, her business was $6 million in debt and she had no real friends in her high-class demimonde.
Kate Spade killed herself exactly as Scott had, found Tuesday morning in her multi-million Upper East Side apartment. She was just 55 years old, yet another victim to a world where nothing is ever what it seems.
