Kate Spade, who died on Tuesday, impacted the way the world looked at American accessories. With a simple black nylon tote featuring her nothing but small, discreet label, the former magazine editor made her mark on the fashion industry.

Spade won two CFDA Awards, her first, in 1995, a Perry Ellis Award for New Fashion Talent. At the time, Linda Wells eloquently described the designer for our CFDA Awards Journal. “Skeptics be dammed,” Wells wrote. “Kate Spade’s bags are, well, maybe not genius, but very, very, clever. They hold a lot of stuff, and they make their owners feel a little jauntier, a little happier just for carrying such a snappy thing.”

In 1997, Spade was named CFDA’s Accessory Designer of the Year. We honor her legacy by reprinting the tribute to her in the 1997 CFDA Awards Journal:

“Not often does a fashion phenomenon emerge whose price tag is in inverse relationship to its style quotient—but that’s the case with Kate Spade, who has almost single-handedly proven to an industry known for thinking otherwise that a chic handbag need not cost upwards of $2,000. The little Kate Spade label has come to stand not only for a young, sprightly urban style, but a certain spontaneity, the kind of easy, irreverent fun that seems never to go out of style. If her bags to riches story has a certain sweet Judy-Garland-and-Mickey-Rooney charm, that’s fine with the designer, who, with her then husband and partner Andy, espouses more a style of life than a life of style. As her handbags dabble in fashion—never going so far as to leap headlong into trends—so do the Spades live and work. And with her other business partners, some of whom have been “best friends since we were little,” as she says, the Kansas City native brings to her company an old-fashioned spirit that is more about growing a good business than business growth—a wholesome American entrepreneurial ethic that over the last 30 years had seemed on the verge of extinction. Thanks to the success of Spade and her colleagues, it can be taken off the endangered species list.”