Kate Spade puts one designer back in charge, naming Jonathan Saunders creative director

Kate Spade New York has named Jonathan Saunders as executive creative director, the Tapestry-owned brand said in a statement on 21 July. Saunders takes up the post on 26 August, reporting to Eva Erdmann, the brand's president and chief executive, and will relocate to Kate Spade's headquarters in Hudson Yards, New York.

Saunders arrives after more than two decades across some of fashion's more design-driven houses, including Alexander McQueen, Diane von Furstenberg, Calvin Klein, Tiffany & Co. and Pucci, most recently serving as chief creative director at & Other Stories. At Kate Spade he will lead product design direction and oversee the brand's visual identity — both functions under a single creative lead.

Jonathan shares our consumer obsession, and he understands the heart of our brand.

Putting one designer over both product and image is the more telling part of the announcement. It is the model Tapestry already leans on at Coach, where a single creative director has held the design brief for over a decade through the brand's own rebuild. Whether the same structure does as much for Kate Spade, a smaller brand marking its 30th year, becomes clear only once Saunders' first collections reach stores.

For Japan, where Kate Spade trades through department-store concessions and mall and outlet doors as much as through its own shops, a creative reset arrives late and arrives as assortment. The buy is set seasons ahead, and a concession wall is rebuilt only once the new product actually lands. In our view the thing to watch is not Saunders' first collection but his second: whether the Japanese buy follows the new direction in full, or whether safe carryover keeps the existing bestsellers on the wall. That is a product and presentation question before it is a marketing one.