ory Burch and I go way back. Her Reva ballet flats, with the brand’s T logo emblazoned on a medallion affixed to the toe, were a status signifier at my high school, an assignation of class in the mid-’00s. Then, they were everywhere. Five years later, she made an appearance on the fashion show of the moment, Gossip Girl, alongside star Blake Lively, who seemed the perfect avatar for the brand: blonde, magnetic, a little preppy, a little boho, the consummate Upper East Sider. It was an aesthetic of which Burch herself—who lived at New York City’s Pierre hotel and was a fixture on the benefit circuit—was the perfect embodiment. The look was so Tory, a wardrobe made up of Moroccan-inspired tunics paired with crisp white trousers, graphic-print shift dresses, and shorts worn with sweaters layered over collared shirts.

Burch found success almost instantly, as well as the sort of misogynistic undermining that so often confronts women who achieve it.

Burch has built one of the biggest and most robust sportswear brands in the history of American fashion. Her label has grown exponentially over the past two decades, thanks to both her eye and her entrepreneurial prescience. Burch anticipated the e-commerce boom and launched Tory Burch on the internet, rather than through traditional wholesale. She knew how to slowly build the hype with her in-store experiences, starting with a small outpost in the downtown neighborhood of NoLIta, decorated in orange lacquer and chinoiserie. It was all conceived to exude good (and expensive) taste, but in a way that felt more accessible (and attainable) for people who didn’t actually summer in the Hamptons.

Today, Burch has more than 370 stores worldwide and annual revenue that has been reported at approaching $2 billion. Last year, she was nominated by the Council of Fashion Designers of America for American Womenswear Designer of the Year, the industry’s equivalent of an Oscar nod for Best Picture. It’s all a reflection of the fact that we are in the midst of what armchair experts and social-media folk have dubbed “the Toryssance.” Burch’s vision has shifted from that shiny, country-clubby lifestyle to one that feels more grounded in her own idiosyncratic personal style. Instead of the shifts, there are sci-fi-ish hoop-skirt dresses inspired by deconstructed crinolines. Alix Earle, Chloe Fineman, Uma Thurman, and Jeremy O. Harris sit front row at the shows. This past season, both Emily Ratajkowski and Paloma Elsesser walked her runway. Two decades in, Tory Burch has entered her cool era.

“I didn’t consider myself a designer in the beginning,” Burch tells me. We’re talking in her office in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, a mix of classic and modern done up in light woods and deep blues, with gilded touches throughout. Family photos are on display everywhere; she is the mother of three boys, and two of her three stepdaughters work with her. Burch sits cross-legged on a sunken-in couch that she says is around the same age as her brand. She is wearing ivory parachute pants, a matching zip-up top, thick silver spike earrings, and a pair of high-heeled mules with a square toe. “I was a little embarrassed to call myself a designer back then, but I feel now that I’ve earned that badge,” she says. “I learned how to be a technical designer over time.”

It’s a skill evident in Burch’s collections, which are still filled with plenty of pragmatic pieces for the original Tory Burch loyalists, like the tailored trousers, the throw-on-and-go knits, the button-ups, and, of course, those Reva flats. These wardrobe staples, however, now have their own little tweaks and twists that set them apart and give them a certain weight, like a sleeve sewn together to appear scrunched-up, or a skirt hem with coils of cascading ribbonlike trim. “I’ve always had an eclectic mind,” Burch says, “and so maybe that’s coming through a little bit more.”

Burch herself was a tomboy who didn’t like miniskirts and loved hanging out with her three brothers—one of whom, Robert Isen, now works at Burch’s company as chief legal officer and president of corporate development. But despite her mom’s fashion playground of a wardrobe, Burch preferred thrifting for vintage jeans and tees. “I had an area in our house with all of my clothes, vintage trunks, photographs, love letters—everything that was dear to me—and no one was allowed to go in there,” Reva Robinson recalls. “Tory and I would sneak up, and I would show her all of these beautiful fabrics, which she wasn’t interested in,” she says. “Tory was a tough little girl.”

It was early on in the COVID-19 pandemic that Burch’s impulse to go her own way resurfaced. Even though she was happy with the evolution of her business and passionate about her work with the Tory Burch Foundation, which she launched in 2009 to support female entrepreneurs, she had begun to feel detached from the products she was putting out into the world. “Over the years, I feel like things became less of a personal vision,” she says. “That’s why I wanted to pull it in, and I think when you look at the success of things, sometimes you go toward that success instead of reinventing that success and having another success. I felt like I had to reinvent the concept of what would be us today.”

A few weeks later, on the set of a shoot for Burch’s Resort 2025 collection, I get a sense of what that looks like. Hip-hop music—Burch’s favorite genre—plays softly throughout the photography studio inside the company’s sprawling Jersey City office, which houses the creative teams. With a Starbucks cup in hand, Burch sifts through the precisely organized racks, smiling at the sight of a fuzzy hand-knit sequined shawl-collar sweater, a candy-apple green crystal-studded draped goddess dress, and a pair of baggy cargo pants. “We are evolving past the logo,” Burch says. “We want people to recognize the clothes for the clothes.”

Burch follows every shot closely, adjusting the folds on a dress herself, so that they catch the right light, or pulling a pant leg up over a deep-red boot so it falls exactly the way she wants it to.

The new phase of Tory Burch was catalyzed in 2019, when Burch turned over the position of CEO of the company to her husband, former LVMH Fashion Group chairman and chief executive officer Pierre-Yves Roussel, so that she could focus more on design.

“Fashion is about tension,” Roussel tells me. “I love disruption, but it has to be meaningful disruption. I think one of the things that explains the success of Tory Burch is the authenticity of the brand. There’s no fake story. It’s real, including her being able to say, ‘I need to disrupt myself,’ which isn’t easy.”

As much as Burch’s current design ethos is closer to her own sense of style, she always thinks about how she sees other women dressing. “People used to say to me, ‘Why don’t you design how you dress?’ And I thought that was so funny,” she says. “I knew I had this Herculean effort ahead of me. I also knew that we had a pretty big business at the 10-year mark, and I wanted to be careful because I had a ton of employees already. I didn’t want to jeopardize the business. I had a responsibility,” she explains. “That’s the challenge for me: How do I design things that I wouldn’t wear but I want to see other women wearing?”

Burch also wanted to give those women a signature scent, which led to the launch of her new fragrance, out this month. It’s called Sublime, a word that was introduced into the Burch world as a print in the Fall 2024 runway collection.

The campaign for Sublime stars Kendall Jenner, and the scent is a mix of rose, vetiver, and leather—a sexy but not overpowering smell that Burch explains is meant to represent “dichotomy, because women are filled with dichotomies.”

What Burch has been able to do is incredibly rare in the fashion business. Although fashion itself is supposed to be about change, the industry can often be risk-averse. But instead of playing it safe or falling back on fantasy, Burch has taken the idea of leaning into personal identity and intuition and turned it into a blockbuster concept—one of which Tory Burch, the brand, and also Tory Burch, the woman, are living proof.

When I ask about what the future holds, Burch straightens up and cracks a curious smile. “I don’t think about where we’ll be in a year. It’s more about continuing a dialogue that we’ve started,” she says. “I love that women today are more individual than they’ve ever been. I don’t feel like there are a lot of rules anymore, and I think that’s a wonderful thing.”

– Courtesy: Harper’s Bazaar

“Over the years, I feel like things became less of a personal vision. That’s why I wanted to pull it in, and I think when you look at the success of things, sometimes you go toward that success instead of reinventing that success and having another success. I felt like I had to reinvent the concept of what would be us today. We are evolving past the logo. We want people to recognize the clothes for the clothes.” – Tory Burch

Today, Tory Burch has more than 370 stores worldwide and annual revenue that has been reported at approaching $2 billion. Last year, she was nominated by the
Council of Fashion Designers of America for American Womenswear Designer of the Year, the industry’s equivalent of an Oscar nod for Best Picture. It’s all a reflection of the fact that we are in the midst of what armchair experts and social-media folk have dubbed “the Toryssance.” Burch’s vision has shifted from that shiny, country-clubby lifestyle to one that feels more grounded in her own
idiosyncratic personal style. Two decades in, Tory Burch has entered her cool era.