Sometime in the early 1990s and not too long out of college, I fell in with a couple from Texas who were improbably far along in establishing enviable New York lives. Only a few years older than I was, they were already married, which was unusual in itself, and they lived in an apartment that they owned, even more alien — a two-bedroom in a postwar, doorman building in Greenwich Village they had bought with money earned from well-paying paying jobs in fashion and advertising. They shared an exacting and meticulous style and a tendency to gravitate toward those who would eventually make a distinctive cultural mark.

One night, sitting around their oval marble coffee table, my friends told me about acquaintances of theirs, Kate Brosnahan and Andy Spade, who were creating a line of simple handbags audaciously inscribed with a name that meant absolutely nothing: Kate Spade. Who was Kate Spade? She had been a fashion editor at Mademoiselle.

Typically when you bought a logoed handbag or piece of luggage, you were buying a connection to a European, aristocratic past, or at least the semblance of it. Hermès and Louis Vuitton had served the French elite since the mid-19th century. Coco Chanel began seriously marketing her iconic quilted purses with their inverted Cs in the 1950s, long after she had revolutionized the way wealthy women dressed. Kate Spade had no empire, no history, only the belief that women would find resonance in the particularly American strain of gumption she was selling, the profound wish to declare herself.

In 1993, the year that her line made its debut, Prada won the award for best accessories from the Council of Fashion Designers of America. Prada had begun as a Milanese leathergoods house in 1913, and in the early 1990s the black nylon totes and backpacks it made became the ultimate fetish objects of the moneyed, professional class. Their utility suggested a sense of busyness and ambition well suited to a new age in which emergent technologies were changing everything. A Prada backpack, especially, worn as you walked briskly up Madison Avenue, announced that your place in the firmament of the knowledge-class was secure.

The subversive ingenuity of the Kate Spade brand, with its cheerfulness and indulgent use of color, was that it rejected both the old hierarchies and entitlements and the newer tensions of the meritocracy in favor of an ethos that implied you were already someone — here and now just as you were.

After Ms. Spade killed herself on Tuesday in her Park Avenue apartment, tying one end of a scarf around her neck and the other to a door, her sister Reta Saffo, from whom she was estranged, gave an interview to The Kansas City Star, offering that Ms. Spade, whom she called “a dear little person,’’ had struggled with debilitating depression for several years and had shied away from hospitalization for fear that word would get out and people would discover that the spunk and whimsy were performance. A few years ago she had developed a new line of shoes and handbags called Frances Valentine, an enterprise to which she was apparently so attached that she changed her own name to include Valentine.

Like L’Wren Scott, born Luann Bambrough, a fashion designer who also killed herself with a scarf in her Manhattan apartment, Ms. Spade came from the sort of modest beginnings to which the fashion world can seem overtly hostile. Hiring practices, especially on the editorial side, have long favored bloodline and pedigree.

Though it hardly requires a prestigious education to get coffee and call messengers, the fashion world as I witnessed it, at the turn of the 21st century when I was writing about it, seemed to favor the graduate of Columbia or Vassar over anyone who might arrive fresh out of City College, every time. Publicists were rich wives or titled heiresses. You would hear about people who feigned vague European accents but who really came from Arkansas or Poughkeepsie, people who played liberally with their histories out of shame and necessity.

A Catholic schoolgirl from Kansas City, Mo., with a degree from Arizona State and a father who was in construction, Ms. Spade transcended her background in ways that are not easily possible in the most rarefied corners of Manhattan life. It is hard not to wonder what kind of toll it takes to merge past selves with present identities, to hold on to old loyalties and new aspirations. Someday Kate Spade might have told us, or maybe, in the end, she did.

Follow Ginia Bellafante on Twitter: @GiniaNYT