After the ‘Toryssance’: Tory Burch’s Balancing Act

NEW YORK – On a Thursday afternoon a few days before Tory Burch’s New York Fashion Week show, the designer was in her office seated on a fussy, powder-blue velvet couch with white trim that would soon be trash. Her Flatiron headquarters are currently being redecorated to reflect the brand’s new aesthetic era.

“All of the furniture is going to be lighter,” she said. The ebullient décor of yore — a mix of shabby-chic, town-and-country elements with David Hicksian graphics — is being replaced with a mostly white palette accented with some rusty mohair.

Beyond office interiors, much has been made of the shift in visual vocabulary underway at Tory Burch in recent years. Beginning with spring-summer 2021′s Shaker collection, she began to shake off the Sixties- and Seventies-inflected, global-traveller glam that had defined her brand’s ethos for more than a decade. Burch used the runway to reset the brand’s tone to a stripped-back modernism — more elevated, more sophisticated, cooler.

Revamped Image

As Burch’s revamped runway aesthetic has trickled into shoes, bags, stores and campaigns, the industry has taken note. What does Burch think of the so-called “Toryssance?”

“I don’t think about it,” Burch said. “I’m flattered that people are seeing what we’re doing and appreciating that it’s relevant.”

Last year, The New York Times ran a story headlined “That’s Tory Burch?,” an examination of the origins of and reaction to the brand’s improbable new vibe. It was a bit of a backhanded compliment — implicit in any resurgence is the stagnation that preceded it.

Burch is too diplomatic and measured to put anything so bluntly, but the sentiment is tacit in her talking points. “I started to hear about the Tory world and I didn’t relate to it myself,” she said. “People were saying things that were ‘on-brand,’ and I’m like, ‘How is that on-brand?”

Whatever the offending “on-brand” product, mood board or reference was, Burch wouldn’t say. But it was a catalyst to finally scratch the itch for change that started 10 years ago, around the time she started dating her husband Pierre-Yves Roussel.

When they met, Roussel was leading LVMH Fashion Group, overseeing brands like Givenchy, Celine, Loewe, and Marc Jacobs, and was fluent in the language of French luxury. Tory Burch was aspirational, extremely American. It was not “fashion” in the snob’s sense of the word. It was for a different woman — words like “preppy” and “suburban” applied — who much of luxury fashion seemed happy to ignore. Meanwhile, Burch’s company was well on its way to $2 billion in annual sales.

Burch and Roussel married in 2016. In 2019, he became chief executive of Tory Burch, a role she had previously occupied.

His appointment changed “literally everything,” Burch said. “It’s night and day.” Asked for specifics, Burch said that he streamlined supply chains, simplified operations, brought Tory Sport into the main collection and stewarded the business through Covid-19. “When you had 350 stores shut and with no visibility on when they would open and close and 5,000 employees that you wanted to protect, it was a very intense time,” Burch said. “Having him as a partner to help me navigate that was critical for our business.”

Roussel’s participation freed up Burch to focus on the creative process. In the past five years, she has built a creative inner circle of New York’s fashion cool kids, including her stepdaughters Izzie and Pookie Burch, Jaime Perlman (editor of More or Less magazine) and the stylist Brian Molloy, best known for his work with The Row. Chris Peters, formerly of Creatures of the Wind, recently joined the design team. At one point, Narciso Rodriguez was consulting. Emily Ratajkowski and Sydney Sweeney have been faces of the brand, along with singer Yuqi of K-pop group G-Idle.

The designs have not been timid. The spring-summer 2024 collection included spacey mini-dresses with stiff, hoop-like hems and cow earrings. Collection notes emphasised the word “effortless” seemingly without irony. For Autumn Winter 2024, the conceptualism continued with shiny, croc-embossed bodysuits and geometric, structured tunics and skirts (which drew comparisons to lampshades from Vogue).

Burch said that the new direction is more in line with her personal tastes than might have been obvious from the first 15 years of the brand. “It’s hard to get a personality across in a brand,” she said. “Especially when you’re raising children and you want to maintain a level of privacy. I have a little more humour than people get. I’m a risk taker. I like to try new things. I like to push the limits. I like to experiment. I always have, so it’s not a new thing.”

At the brand’s runway show Monday in the penthouse of the former Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Burch infused her collection with more softness and wearability than in recent seasons without diluting her newfound conceptual proclivities. The space was outfitted with aqua green tiles to look like an indoor pool at an athletic complex, and the collection bore the influence of sports: fencing, ballet, judo and swimming. “It was about form, movement and synchronicity,” Burch said.

Some references were quite literal — a sequined bathing suit styled with loose, seersucker judo pants, and a range of ballet-inspired shoes, including the Reva flats that once drove Burch’s business. Others were more abstract. For example, the flame-like pattern on a chenille jacquard coat was actually abstract swimmers and waves. Many of the fabrics were intensely worked, such as a quilted wool-and-silk top and a stiff jacquard skirt that stood away from the waist.

Steady Transition

By pushing things aesthetically, Burch said she’s attracting new customers and inspiring old ones to rediscover the brand. She does not feel compelled to dumb things down. “Customers are super smart, they’re super savvy and they have so much access to so many things they never used to,” Burch said. “They’re appreciating the craftsmanship and the quality at not a super expensive, luxury price point.”

That said, Burch is aware that there’s no better way to tank your business than to completely alienate your core customer. If she felt increasingly misaligned with the previous Tory Burch aesthetic, “I didn’t want to just leave it behind either,” she said. “I really loved the business we built and really appreciate our customer.”

She has been meticulous about balancing risk and stability in terms of price and product. The “piece of the dream” entry-price point, for items such as the Miller sandal, is still under $200, while the Lee Radziwill handbag can go up to $1,400.

Bringing Back the Flat

Some signature items will never be discarded. Caftans, for example. “It’s just an easy shape that I love,” Burch said, noting that the pandemic gave her the opportunity to reimagine her core offering under her new, modernist parameters.

Then there’s the Reva. Perhaps no product is more synonymous with Tory Burch than the round-toe ballet flat with a gold logo medallion, named after her mother. In the early 2000s, the Reva was the go-to shoe for working women on the subway and college students alike.

“It was more than just a shoe,” Burch said. “It was a moment in time.” It was quietly pulled from inventory in 2017, and was officially relaunched on the spring runway. “We were like, ‘How do we approach something that was really the one of the foundations of where we started? How do we give it the respect of what it was, but also take it to where we are today?” she said. “That was not easy.”

After about 40 meetings to streamline the silhouettes and hardware — bevelling, cutting it out, opening the foot — they came up with a new ballet flat and mule she says are “I don’t want to say more modern, but interesting,” said Burch.

The Reva wasn’t the only big accessory launch on the spring runway. A handbag version of Burch’s Pierced shoe made its debut in two sizes, its signature accent a piece of hardware that looks like a piercing. The hardware is removable, and the plan is to issue different styles, including resin and wood, sold separately so customers can change the look of the bag.

Handbags account for 45 percent of the Tory Burch business, while shoes make up 35 percent. Burch doesn’t want to make any predictions about how the Reva and Pierced launches will land. “It’s hard to speculate but I hope they resonate,” she said.

Feedback still hasn’t yet come in from the brand’s previous big initiative: Sublime, a fragrance two years in the making that launched as part of a partnership with Shiseido last month. Kendall Jenner is the face of the scent’s campaign shot by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggot. Sublime has gone out into the world just as a cat-themed retail activation co-curated by Burch and Humberto Leon of Opening Ceremony wraps up its journey to Paris, Shanghai, Miami and New York. “I just loved the creativity that brought to our company,” Burch said of the initiative, dubbed “Animal House.”

Sale Speculation

Last year it was reported that the brand had hired Morgan Stanley to explore strategic options, including a potential IPO. “We don’t have any plans yet to do anything,” Burch said when asked if there was an update. “I don’t want to sell the company.”

“One thing I’m great at is picking partners and they’ve been in for a long time,” she said, referring to General Atlantic and BDT Capital, which have owned minority stakes in Tory Burch since 2012.

After two decades, Tory Burch has emerged as one of a handful of major American fashion houses capable of attracting top-tier luxury creative and business talent. “The culture is something that I have worked on for a very long time,” Burch said. “When I started the company, one of the first things I said was I didn’t want a bitchy fashion environment. There’s so much chaos in the world that I want a place where people can come and feel that they can be an individual and feel safe.”

At the moment, there is a lot of chaos in the world contributing to an unstable market. “I don’t think it’s just wholesale,” Burch said. “There are wars, there are things happening in Asia every day, there’s an election that’s super divisive. It’s about how consumers think about things and often it’s emotional.”

Burch believes in resilience by way of diversifying, not relying too much on one area of the world for production, retail or wholesale. She believes in innovation and inspiring the customer.

“People will still want to shop and still feel great about themselves,” she said. “Yes, it’s a hard market. Do I think the market will come back? Yes. And it’s cyclical. Markets go up and down all the time.”