Andy Spade is the American entrepreneur and visionary known for co-founding Kate Spade, Sleepy Jones, and Frances Valentine. In partnership with his wife, Kate, he is responsible for creating a colorful and whimsical aesthetic that offered a refreshing change to the design world. JP Williams and Andy Spade collaborated to create a quirky and disarming selection of images that form a window into this accomplished photographer’s peripatetic mind. In this book, Andy, described by “Style Guy” Glenn O’Brien in the introduction as “bon vivant, master of drollery, messenger of the hidden punch line,” is revealed as the kind of artist that elevates the everyday into the sublime.
Andy Spade's "Likes" volume resembles the tomes of traditional dictionaries and reference literatures: those densely packed, clothbound, hardback books that have come to be recognized as the shape and weight for publications to outline systems of logic. In using the formal space of a physical book as referent and reference––self-referential to the book as a medium for meaning, reference to the virtually-mediated process of marking off the images you "like" online––Spade makes a tribute to the archival influence that prefigures and persists through our interactions with contemporary environments. Spades "Likes" asks us, in thinking through means of measuring physical and online experience, to consider the index as an invisible witness––like digital breadcrumbs in a virtual wood, we continue to seek new ways to mark where we've traveled, to hold on to what we find, and to defy the idea "you can't take it with you."
