Best friends Elyce Arons and Kate Spade idolized Mary Tyler Moore. Because of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” about a plucky single reporter in 1970s Minneapolis, the two bonded, studied journalism and launched two companies: Kate Spade and Frances Valentine, whose colorful, vintage-inflected fashions owe a debt to Moore’s retro threads.
“I wanted to be Mary,” Arons tells Alexa. So, when Moore’s widow, Dr. Robert Levine, reached out to her, she was “on cloud nine.”
On Sept. 29, Frances Valentine is releasing a limited-edition capsule collection inspired by Moore’s iconic TV characters. Twenty percent of net sales will go to the Mary Tyler Moore Vision Initiative, dedicated to advancing vision research and raising awareness around diabetes-related vision loss (which Moore, who died in 2017, suffered from).
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