What can Kate Spade teach us about style?

I've been reading a lot of heavy-hitter books lately - full of mental nutrition and good ole fashioned learnin'. But after all the proverbial broccoli of The Number Sense and The Blank Slate, I sort of felt like my brain deserved some candy. I was looking for something that would serve as a mental respite from the hard-hitting, requires-thinkin', big-word-usin' tomes that have stacked my night table as of late. I could not have picked a better, more inane, "style over substance" book for the task then Ms. Kate Spade's Style manual.

The book itself is gorgeous and I'm a huge Kate Spade booster. Like everything else she does - the book is elegant and funky: well-bound, pretty colors, and delicate line drawings by Virginia Johnson. The content, however, is inane and has probably done as much damage to my cerebellum as a whole season of reality TV.

But, no book is without its redeeming bits o' knowledge, and (despite her best attempts) Ms. Spade's was not either. The following, is some of the interesting knowledge contained in this entirely vapid and vain publication:

• Kate is a huge Diana Vreeland fan, mostly because she, like our friend Kate, was a huge fan of elegant clothes dressed up with splashy accessories. She also had a notable quotables wall a mile long - one of my favorites being: "Blue jeans are the most beautiful things since the gondola."
• Things Kate likes that surprised me: Woody Allen, Edward Hopper (though that really shouldn't have surprised me - her clothes could be lifted right from one of his paintings), Futura and Baskerville typeface, Keds, Bjork, LL Bean rubber boots, the Barcelona chair, and Wilco.
• There is a Council of Fashion Designers of America and they have an acronym (cfda)
• Kate advocates the use of pencil cases as evening bags "I like that they're small and have such a compact design."
• Pink goes with everything and should be worn all the time. According to Diana Vreeland "Why don't you travel with a little raspberry colored cashmere blanket to throw over yourself in hotels and trains?"
• Ancient Persians believed that the Earth rested upon an enormous sapphire whose reflection colored the heavens above.
• In 1977 a University of Pittsburgh art history professor made a pyramid of 45,600 Hostess Cupcakes as a visual ode to Dadaism and Pop Art. It was his way of connecting eras in art, such as the pyramids of ancient Egypt and Warhol's soup cans.
• The iconic "little black dress" was the work of Coco Chanel in 1919, but didn't become a wardrobe staple until the 50s. Coco, incidentally, began her life as a milliner.
• Rene Lacoste (the tennis player) was dubbed "the alligator" by the American press in 1927. A few years later, he and his partner put a little alligator on a cotton pique shirt, thus starting the international sensation/madness.
• A small loaf of Wonder Bread has 201 dots on the packaging.
• The use of cane handles on bags was due to leather shortages after WWII
• The Army Air Corps commissioned Bausch & Lomb to make them sunglasses in the 1930s for their pilots. They had very specific requirements: the frames needed to curve below the eye b/c pilots were often looking down at an instrument panel, and the lenses needed to protect the pilots from the strong glare at high altitudes. Ray-Ban was the eventual creation from those original specifications.