Kate Spade New York

Kate Spade New York appointed Jonathan Saunders as Executive Creative Director, effective August 26, 2026. Saunders comes from & Other Stories (Chief Creative Director) and has held senior creative roles at Diane von Furstenberg, Calvin Klein, Tiffany & Co., Pucci, and Alexander McQueen.

Leadership read: Kate Spade's last significant creative chapter was built around the brand's founder-era codes — the spade motif, the color palette, the knowing wit — and those codes have been increasingly managed rather than evolved. Bringing in Saunders, whose portfolio runs from McQueen's structural severity to DVF's color-forward femininity to & Other Stories' accessible European cool, signals that Tapestry is betting on creative reinvention rather than stewardship. The hire commits Kate Spade to a wholesale creative reassessment: Saunders will own both product and visual identity, which means any repositioning he drives will be visible across the full commercial line, not just runway or brand marketing. The broader related-signals set contains 12 leadership changes we've tracked in the last 90 days, though most cluster in insurance, CPG, and agency ECD appointments — Digitas naming Jack Delmonte as ECD from VML is the closest structural parallel. The consumer-brand creative leadership pattern is relatively thin in this window, which means the Kate Spade move stands somewhat apart rather than inside a dense wave. Across heritage consumer brands at this stage of portfolio repositioning, the functional pressure tends to concentrate in brand strategy, product commercialization, and consumer-insights leadership — specifically the capability to translate a creative directorial shift into category-level ranging and wholesale and DTC channel execution without losing the brand equity that justified the repositioning in the first place.

curated · 2026-07-21 · context →