‘Her Clothes Capture the Joyfulness of Mary’: Mary Tyler Moore’s Husband Partners With Kate Spade Designer to Launch Fashion Line (EXCLUSIVE LOOK)
Elyce Arons' fashion line, Frances Valentine, has partnered with widower Dr. S. Robert Levine and the Mary Tyler Moore Vision Initiative for an MTM-inspired collection
With her iconic roles as Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show in the 1960s and Mary Richards on The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the 1970s, Mary Tyler Moore became one of classic TV’s most beloved stars. Moore was a singularly charming performer and fashion icon, and from the smartly tailored wardrobe of capri pants and ballet flats she wore on The Dick Van Dyke Show to her colorful career-woman looks on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, the actress set many trends and became the standard-bearer for the depiction of modern womanhood onscreen.
Over 60 years after she first delighted TV viewers, Moore remains a source of inspiration for multiple generations. Fashion designer Elyce Arons is one of the many women who proudly cite the actress as a heroine. Arons cofounded the Kate Spade line with its namesake, her best friend from college (who she affectionately calls “Katy”), and paid homage to a famous lyric from the Mary Tyler Moore Show theme song for the title of her bestselling recent memoir, We Might Just Make It After All: My Best Friendship with Kate Spade, about their long friendship and the tragedy of losing Spade to suicide in 2018.
Arons and Spade cofounded Frances Valentine, a fashion line dedicated to joyful, vintage-inspired looks, in 2016, and in the new year, the brand is launching a capsule collection inspired by Mary Tyler Moore. Arons partnered with Dr. S. Robert Levine, Moore’s husband from 1983 until her passing and the CEO of the Mary Tyler Moore Vision Initiative, for the collection, and a portion of its proceeds will go directly to the charity.
Moore was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 1969, and later suffered from diabetes-related vision loss—a condition the Mary Tyler Moore Vision Initiative is dedicated to fighting. To promote Diabetes Awareness Month this November and the Frances Valentine collection, coming in January 2026, Elyce Arons and Dr. S. Robert Levine sat down with Woman’s World to discuss Mary Tyler Moore’s enduring legacy of style and positivity.
Woman’s World: How did this partnership for Frances Valentine’s Mary Tyler Moore-inspired fashion collection come to be?
Elyce Arons: Mary was an inspiration at a time when women didn’t have the same rights that we do today. Her character was a confident modern woman who was single and went out and made it in a male-dominated field. I loved the fact that she was stylish and cool and confident, with great friends and a great apartment, and she did it all on her own.
Katy and I met at the University of Kansas when we were 18. We were both journalism majors, and as we were getting to know each other, we realized that we both chose the major because of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. We actually got to meet Mary. At one point in the early days of Kate Spade, she came to our office, and it was amazing to have our icon walk through the door. She was lovely—the nicest person you’d ever want to meet. She was down-to-earth, cheerful and fun, and we got to tell her how she inspired us to start our business.
Cut to a few months ago, I got a call from the Mary Tyler Moore Vision Initiative, and Robert’s team told us that they’d been watching Frances Valentine for a while, and it felt very authentically Mary, which made my heart fill with joy. Robert came into the office and invited me for a tour of his home and Mary’s closet.
It’s bizarre. It’s come full circle from when I was a child to adulthood, and I almost feel like there are angels making this all happen. Getting to go to Mary Tyler Moore’s house and try on her clothes was phenomenal. All I wanted to do was call Katy and say, “You’re not going to believe this.” I feel really grateful.
Robert Levine: I’ve been looking for brands we could align ourselves with, but they had to have a certain sensibility that was consistent with who Mary was. She never used her name and likeness for commercial purposes. She wanted to hold onto her specialness without over-commercializing it. Reading Elyce’s book, the genuine love and respect for Mary was so obvious. It was a bit of serendipity that you never quite expect in your life, but the fit is wonderful, and when we first met, I told Elyce that she has a very special Mary energy and her clothes capture the joyfulness of Mary.
WW: What kind of pieces are in the Frances Valentine collection?
EA: We’re really focused on the Mary Richards years, and we have some looks inspired by the Laura Petrie years as well. We’re taking the nostalgic silhouettes and making them more modern. We use different fabrications and we put pockets in everything, but the nostalgia is still there. They’re classic pieces that are meant to live in your closet forever and be passed down to your daughter or granddaughter.
WW: A portion of the proceeds from this collection will go toward the Mary Tyler Moore Vision Initiative. What was Mary’s approach to charitable work?
RL: Her belief that anything was possible transcended her acting career and became part of her advocacy. She was the international chair of what was then called the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, now called Breakthrough T1D, for over 30 years and really helped that organization grow and built awareness about diabetes. She helped to raise billions of dollars, but there’s unfinished business, because we don’t yet have a cure.
The complication that had the most impact on her life was her loss of vision from diabetes. It stole her joy. Here was this extraordinary icon of independence, and she was losing that autonomy. When Mary passed, I committed myself to doing something in that space and making Mary’s dream of a world without vision loss from diabetes real, and that’s how the Mary Tyler Moore Vision Initiative came to be.
When Mary was alive, we once had around 100 children and their families go to Congress to advocate for supporting diabetes research. We had a gala the night before, and we gave each of the children an opportunity to go onstage and introduce themselves. After all of the children had gone up and talked about themselves and their diabetes, in an unplanned moment, Mary jumped onstage and said, “Hi, I’m Mary Tyler Moore. I’m 68. I have diabetes.” That insight, intuition and ability to show those children that she was just like them made for such a special moment.
WW: Did Mary keep most of her old clothes?
RL: Around five years after she passed, I finally took the very tough step of going through her closet and clearing things out. I kept her handbags and accessories. She was a big fan of Judith Leiber and classic bags that were really detailed in their design, and I kept her couture clothes and some other special pieces, including the dress she wore when she won her special Tony Award in 1980.
EA: The pieces she wore as Mary Richards and Laura Petrie are sadly long gone because the network didn’t keep them and Mary didn’t keep them because their life cycle was finished, but those are the quintessential pieces that we based the collection on.
WW: Do you have a favorite look that Mary wore?
EA: One of my favorites was her yellow and white checkered outfit in The Mary Tyler Moore Show. It was a whole suit with wide-leg pants. It was so cool, and I wanted to figure out a way to make it, because it’s unique and fun and quintessentially Mary, but also so of that time. She tended to dress in a lot of color, which I love.
WW: What are your favorite episodes of ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’ and ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’?
EA: I love the Dick Van Dyke Show episode “The Curious Thing About Women” [season 1, episode 16], where she accidentally blows up a raft and can’t get it back in the box.
My favorite Mary Tyler Moore Show episode is “You’ve Got a Friend” [season 3, episode 11]. There’s a scene where she and her father are standing in the kitchen, and her mother walks out and says, “Don’t forget to take your pill.” And they both answer, “I won’t.” The birth control pill was one of those things that people didn’t talk about back then, and after that moment, she and her father have this heart-to-heart talk about being there for each other. It’s a really special episode, and I get choked up just thinking about it.
RL: The Dick Van Dyke Show episode “My Blonde-Haired Brunette,” [season 1, episode 2] convinced Dick and Carl Reiner that Mary could do comedy. In the episode, Mary is frustrated that Dick doesn’t seem to be paying attention to her, so she and her friend cook up this idea that she’ll dye her hair blonde like Marilyn Monroe and then he’ll love her more. She gets on the phone with him and asks what he would think if she was blonde, and he says she’d look like Harpo Marx, but of course, she had already dyed it, so she scurries to change her hair back to her natural color, and he comes home before she’s finished, so she’s half-blonde and half-brunette, and she just breaks down in this crying, snorting laughter. Her performance was quite brilliant, and she was only 24.
When it comes to The Mary Tyler Moore Show, “The Dinner Party” [season 4, episode 10] and “Chuckles Bites the Dust” [season 6, episode 7] are classics, and the pilot episode has such a perfect script, it’s taught in drama schools.
WW: Robert, what was Mary’s style like when she wasn’t on-camera?
RL: A signature of Mary’s style was that she always had some whimsy. She would add a Bakelite brooch of a horse’s head or a little Schnauzer to what she was wearing, and she loved classic tailoring with a bit of flair and color.
She had an athletic side because she was a ballet dancer. She was always well put-together. She cared about the details of how she looked, but she really didn’t dress for the public. She dressed to suit her own sensibility. She would start with a classically tailored suit. She liked Armani and Prada, and Etro was one of her favorite designers because of their bright colors and patterns. She was deliberate about what she wore, even if it was a relaxed look. She loved a great cashmere sweater and nicely cut pants, or a white blouse with an Armani suit.
If you watch the opening credits of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, you have to look at how she walks. Her posture is perfect as she strides. She was always completely bolt upright and facing the world in an optimistic way, and her style was an authentic reflection of that.
Conversation
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