There is a lot of talk these days about the lack of women at the top of fashion brands — the statistics are terrible, the gender imbalance striking. It is one of the reasons Kate Spade, the designer who was found dead in her home on Tuesday morning, was so important to so many of us.

She represented not just a terrific talent who built an idea about handbags into what became a billion dollar brand, but a critical figure in the continuum of women who have defined fashion in the United States: designers who thought about what other women (like her) would want in their closets (and later, their homes) and who solved that problem without elitism.

That’s why, in so many profiles over the years, Ms. Spade — or her brand, which she personified — was put in the same cultural bucket as everyone from Dorothy Parker and Nora Ephron to the fictional heroines Nora Charles and Holly Golightly. I always thought of her a bit as Mary Richards throwing her hat up in the air with joy at taking on the big city at the start of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” not because they had the same style, but because they seemed to have the same approach.