NEW YORK – High above the streets in a Midtown building, in an office she’s desperate to redecorate but hasn’t had the time to, Tory Burch is thinking of you.
She’s thinking your dresses should have pockets. Workable ones. Your trousers, too. And if you’re going to wear something funky – such as an emerald green satin cocktail dress designed to look like it’s insouciantly on backward – it should fit. Your cool shoes – pumps whose heels appear to be broken, mules with piercings around their toes – shouldn’t hurt your feet. Your clothes should look stylish but shouldn’t get in your way.
“I’ve learned over the past five years that that’s really my passion: women,” Burch says a few days after her Spring 2024 show. “And women’s bodies. How to really make women feel confident. That’s the biggest thing I think about is: How do you make women feel beautiful and confident, like they can tackle a lot of the hard issues that we’re all facing in the world?”
You’d think the bar for a fashion brand’s success would be higher than: Just make really good clothes. But it isn’t simply that Burch’s clothes are good; they’re genuinely cool. “I can say confidently that in the last 12 months the brand has become a Cool Girl brand,” wrote writer and director Emily Sundberg in her newsletter Feed Me late last month.
On Monday, at the annual Council of Fashion Designers of America awards, Burch was nominated for women’s wear designer of the year – her first time since she launched the brand in 2004.
Over the past five years, Burch has been in the midst of a creative renaissance. She started one of the most successful American fashion brands of the 21st century – originally launched, she recalls now, as a lifestyle brand that would fund a foundation to help women – with her then-husband, financier Christopher Burch. (The two divorced in 2006, and the two were engaged in a highly publicised legal battle over his subsequent brand, C Wonder, that ended in 2015.)
Her Reva ballet flats and Miller sandals, with their ’70s-influenced T logo, and her beaded tunics and kaftans became mainstays of sorority rush parties and snowbird cocktail gatherings. Forbes estimated that she was bringing in about USD1.5 billion in revenue by 2019, but her clothes were often stereotyped as basic. (A 2021 TikTok posited that the brand was “cheugy.”)
“I was spending probably 30 per cent of my time on design, which wasn’t smart or efficient,” she says. Burch, 57, has an old-fashioned poise but is also known to wear a safety pin as an earring. She traces her current design era back to the launch of Tory Sport, a line of performance wear, in 2015. “It was a palate cleanser.” After she married Pierre-Yves Roussel, former chairman and CEO of the LVMH fashion group, in 2018, she convinced him to take over as her CEO in 2019 to allow her to shift priorities.
“Once Pierre-Yves came onboard, that changed everything,” she says. “People ask me if it was hard to give up the CEO title. It was the easiest thing I’ve ever done.”
She began working with Brian Molloy, a stylist who has also had a hand in the transformation of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s luxury brand, the Row, into powerhouse runway statements of the esoterically chic. Molloy said Burch really wanted “to home in on what a woman might feel good wearing, what they might want to wear or what is flattering, or even just working on her.”
She also hired Pookie Burch, her stepdaughter from her marriage to Chris Burch who once ran the beloved brand Trademark with her sister Louisa, as associate creative director about two years ago.
Beginning with her Spring 2021 collection, a look book photographed at the Hancock Shaker Village, the clothes started to shift almost imperceptibly. Less trendy, more elevated, though her prices remained mostly the same. (The backward dress, a runway piece, retails for USD1,498, while shirt dresses are around USD700 and a classic tunic is around USD300.) The design ideas seemed more fully formed, more considered, perhaps even more empathetic to a potential customer’s desire for strength and individuality as opposed to flashiness or mere fashionableness.
“What’s amazing about the Tory renaissance, as we’re calling it, is that she never turned her back on the core customer. It’s more of a slow and steady evolution,” says Rickie De Sole, Nordstrom’s women’s fashion director.
If big luxury houses are cycling through creative directors and heavy-handed rebrands, Burch’s progress shows that “there’s a person at the core of this brand. And I think, in this day and age, knowing that and her being such an important part of the story makes it resonate, and obviously it works with our customer, too.”
The show Burch staged in September, at the natural history museum, was the designer’s first foray into miniskirts and 1960s flashy futurism, and it was widely considered by fashion observers (especially those under 40) as one of the season’s standouts. It was spacey but sophisticated, with hints of Miuccia Prada-ness, though nothing about Burch’s work is a watered-down version of someone else’s ideas. “Capote’s swans in the year 2067,” playwright Jeremy O Harris put it after the show. “Tory tore,” effused designer Christopher John Rogers a few days later.
There are also rumours circulating that Burch could be gearing up for an IPO, after WWD reported that the company hired Morgan Stanley.
Burch’s accessories and clothing feel like future vintage
How does a brand become truly, authentically cool in 2023? Consumers are skeptical of and, in some cases, simply exhausted by the usual gimmicks of stylish photography, celebrity dressing and influencer marketing – although Burch has done a smart job with all of those by putting the right women in her clothing: Emily Ratajkowski in her runway shows, Sydney Sweeney in ad campaigns.
Burch’s coolness is not the chilly, alienating remove of fashion, but something warmer, more approachable.
Fans point to her intelligent digital marketing strategy. “They put pieces in the hands of artists that you wouldn’t typically follow for endorsements of fashion brands,” says Sundberg, name-checking video artist Sam Youkilis, chef Paris Starn and herself as recipients. The vibe is “young and scrappy,” Sundberg says, with Instagram posts of brand dinners captured by an influencer with a roll of film. “Maybe this is smoke and mirrors and the system of content creation is more elaborate than it looks, but from a social point of view, it looks like they have smart, sensible people in the driver’s seat who understand how Instagram, gifting and organic video works.”
Yet that approach has helped the brand bubble up on TikTok, where an influencer’s review can spin a product into a hit without a traditional celebrity or magazine endorsement. Mules with rings around the toes that look like piercings, from the Fall 2023 collection and priced at USD398, have gone viral on the platform.
The approach to design is similarly pragmatic. “I want women to individualise everything,” Burch says, adding that she never wears one designer head-to-toe. She wants her pieces to be seen not as collectible, per se, but as wardrobe staples. Not a cashmere sweater or trouser you throw on every day – though she makes those, too – but items such as a blazer with a faux fur collar, which just arrived in stores, or the pumps with a broken heel are more like future vintage. “Hopefully those dresses and boardshorts, you can wear forever,” she says of the pieces in her spring collection. “That’s the point. How do you design things that have the integrity of design that will last and the quality that will last and also the style?”
“It’s very much a woman designer dressing women,” Pookie says. “What we always try to do in general, each collection, is take something that’s very understandable or identifiable and then distort it a little bit or mess with it.”
Part of the excitement around Burch’s brand seems to stem from a growing fandom around Burch herself. Her rarefied origin myth – raised in an antique farmhouse in Pennsylvania, an Ivy League graduate, a glamorous philanthropist with inimitable taste who idolizes Bunny Mellon – has a hint of Gwyneth Paltrow’s mystique. But while she, like Paltrow, seems at ease with her own mythology, she is also dedicated to design in what almost seems like an act of noblesse oblige.
She doesn’t really want to win over the fashion world, she says, although her CFDA nomination suggests that may be in the works. “I feel like the fashion customer was there when we (launched) early on as well,” Burch says. “For me, it’s not really about courting someone specific. It’s about just thinking about women broadly. I don’t think about a certain kind of woman. Of course we don’t want to alienate our customers that have been with us for so many years. That said, I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t say I want to evolve and have been evolving. And I think I’ve always been intellectually curious. And the concept of reinventing is something I’m really interested in and always have been.”
When asked how customers are responding to Burch’s new pieces, De Sole offered a somewhat cryptic response that “it’s all about personal style” and that customers see something like the pierced mules as “a talking piece, at the end of the day.”
With so few female creative directors at the helms of big brands, Burch’s industry accolades and her ability to pivot are being embraced as a female success story. She rearranged her life so she could do what would make her happy, and to find creative fulfillment.
“There’s a familiarity to it that makes you want to try it, because it’s familiar, but it’s not something that’s already in your closet,” De Sole says. “And I feel like it’s the power of a female creative. She’s wearing these clothes and she has places to go. We all have these busy lives, and she gets it right.” – RACHEL TASHJIAN/WASHINGTON POST
