“There could be a ton of other girls like you, who would have saved their allowance and their babysitting money, or their bat mitzvah money,” she said. Shuffman, who works in finance, recalled browsing the bags at Bloomingdale’s on Lexington Avenue with her mother at the height of the craze. But it wasn’t inappropriate or too adult, the way that walking down the street with a Burberry tote would be,” she said. “You could have something that a grown-up had, and look sophisticated. Priced between $150 and $450 in the 1990s, they were aspirational, but attainable for some city kids - if you hoarded your babysitting pennies, said Carey Shuffman, 27, who attended the private Brearley School. At the turn of the last century her bag came to encapsulate a decidedly Manhattan moment in time. her simple and unfussy carryalls, adorned with little more than a black tab with the name she used professionally in white lettering.

It didn’t matter that the bag’s creator was born Katherine Brosnahan in Kansas City, Mo. “She had started this company with New York in mind, and we were all born and bred New Yorkers, and it embodied who we wanted to be when we grew up.” Kate Spade’s brand “was New York bred, and we were New York bred, and it was important for us to be part of that culture,” said Gillian Greaves Saines, 34, who grew up on the Upper East Side and carried her books in a black Kate Spade tote to school at Convent of the Sacred Heart off Fifth Avenue. Among those who grew up taking yellow cabs across the Upper East Side to high school and playing hooky on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there was a sense of having lost a girlhood friend: the woman who created the glossy handbags that became a talisman of almost-adulthood and the sine qua non of belonging to the city’s inner circle.

The apparent suicide of Kate Spade, the designer whose eponymous pocketbooks swung from the shoulders of Manhattan’s coolest teenagers, reverberated painfully on Tuesday through a rarefied set of young New York women. It was a nylon sack, with a little black tag, and if you were a teenage girl in New York City in the late ’90s, you simply Had.

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