Jonathan Saunders Is Kate Spade's New Creative Director. Here's Why It Matters.

By Shweta Sonali — 2026-07-24

Kate Spade announced a new creative director last week. The fashion industry did not collectively yawn, which tells you something.

Jonathan Saunders — Glasgow-born, Central Saint Martins-trained, known for prints that are vivid without being shouty — is joining Kate Spade New York as executive creative director, effective August 26, 2026. He reports to brand president and CEO Eva Erdmann, who herself arrived from L'Oréal in late 2024. The band is being reassembled, more or less.

Why This Hire Is Interesting

Saunders is not a safe appointment. He is a specific one. His graduate collection at Central Saint Martins — brightly printed chiffon kaftans, apparently inspired by the Beatles' Yellow Submarine cover — won him the Lancôme Colour Award in 2002. Within two days of that graduation show, Alexander McQueen had commissioned him to design prints. That's the kind of start to a career that doesn't happen twice.

What followed was twenty-odd years of working at houses that could not be more different from each other. McQueen, then Pucci, then Chloé in some consulting capacity, then his own eponymous label, which he closed in 2015. Then Diane Von Furstenberg as chief creative officer — a role he left after about eighteen months, which was messy by most accounts. Then, most recently, chief creative officer at H&M-owned & Other Stories, where he'd been for roughly a year before his "shock exit," as FashionNetwork somewhat dramatically put it, was announced last month.

A career with some sharp turns in it, then. But also one with genuine range.

The Brand He's Walking Into

This is where it gets uncomfortable to ignore. Kate Spade is not thriving. In its most recent quarter, sales fell 10%, or roughly $25 million, to about $220 million. FashionNetwork notes that in the most recent trading update before that, Kate Spade revenues had declined 10% to $219.6 million — and that's a number with a brand-intangible writedown sitting behind it that tells you Tapestry's accountants have already taken a view on what the brand is actually worth. Full-year FY2025 revenue came in at $1.197 billion, down 10% year over year, against a Coach that generated roughly 80% of Tapestry's entire top line and grew 14% in the same period.

Analysts have not been gentle. GlobalData's Neil Saunders — no relation, presumably — said the brand's product assortment is "somewhat confused" and "lacks coherence." That's a fairly pointed way of saying nobody's quite sure what Kate Spade is for anymore.

Actually, that's not quite right — people know what it was for. The original Kate Spade, founded in 1993, stood for something specific: an optimistic, slightly irreverent take on American femininity, all ladylike shapes with a wink built in. The problem is that "classics with a twist" as a brand strategy requires someone to keep deciding which classics, and exactly how much twist. That decision has not been made convincingly for a while.

What Saunders Brings

The appointment signals a focus on modernising its signature style of youthful femininity while leveraging its brand history — which is the kind of sentence that appears in every press release for every creative director appointment, but in this case it maps fairly cleanly onto what Saunders actually does. He is a print designer by formation. He understands colour as a system, not a mood board. That's relevant to a brand built on optimism as an aesthetic, not just a feeling.

He will oversee product design and visual identity. Store environments, too, as far as I can tell from some of the broader reporting. He relocates to New York for this — moving from wherever & Other Stories had him — and will work from the Kate Spade headquarters in Hudson Yards.

Interesting, that last bit.

The same week Saunders was announced, Kate Spade also brought in a new chief marketing officer: Allison Badea, formerly of L'Oréal. Eva Erdmann also came from L'Oréal. There is clearly a particular school of thought operating here, something like the idea that a brand built on feeling needs marketers who understand consumer emotion at scale, and a creative director who can give that emotion a visual language.

The Bigger Picture, Briefly

Tapestry has spent the last two years doing portfolio surgery. The failed $8.5 billion bid to acquire Capri Holdings — which would have brought in Michael Kors, Versace, and Jimmy Choo — collapsed after the FTC blocked it. Stuart Weitzman has since been sold to Caleres for around $120 million, which is considerably less than the $530 million Tapestry paid for it in 2015. The company is now focused on Coach and Kate Spade, and Coach is doing fine. So the pressure is squarely on the other one.

Tapestry's stated plan is to replicate the strategies used in Coach's turnaround — sharper brand identity, less discounting, better product focus. That turnaround took years and was not painless. Saunders is the person now holding the creative end of that process for Kate Spade.

Whether twenty years of working at other people's brands — some of the most demanding ones in the world — translates into the kind of sustained, coherent vision a struggling label actually needs is something nobody can answer yet.

August 26 is when we find out what he thinks the brief is.