AsThe New York Times asked early last year, that’s Tory Burch? The group chat of New York-based industry assistants pinged on my phone: ‘I called it! Tory is cool again!’ Cool, again? It was true—Tory Burch, the de rigueur uniformer of Waspy stay-at-home moms, or the garden-variety lady who lunched, hadn’t been “cool” in some time. But this was changing—The Tory Burch renaissance (or “Toryssiance”) marked a creative pivot for the brand and its customer: They’d left the country club for a high-powered job in the city. Preppy handbook mislaid, fussy beaded cardigans became collarless jackets; a tweed A-line skirt turned to easy slouchy tailoring. This modern, cool Tory girl drank wet martinis at Silencio alongside clubgoing denizens in Khaite and Kallmeyer. She was back—where had she been?
In 2004, Burch launched her brand TRB by Tory Burch. (Her first rebrand perhaps was taking on the cleaner eponym, Tory Burch. As she recalls the late jewelry designer Kenneth Jay Lane saying to her, “It’s the worst name. Everyone’s calling it Tory Burch. What is wrong with you?”) The label would make affordable sportswear separates for women, like Claire McCardell before her, by way of colorful preppy-boho American luxury. And in aesthetics, Burch’s art imitated life: To the manner born, Burch spent her childhood on a Pennsylvanian gentleman’s farm where, as lore says, she rode horses and her parents collected armor. An Ivy League alum, Burch worked in public relations for years at Ralph Lauren, Vera Wang, and Loewe. Then, at 37, she began to build a brand around her own exemplar, her life—as an uptown mother, businesswoman, Hamptonite— and what she wanted to wear.
A first collection debuted from Burch’s Upper East Side apartment with a store following on Elizabeth Street. Inventory sold out on opening day. “Burch set her sights on an overlooked market: aspirational mid-career women and Bergdorf moms seeking affordable quality with the timelessness of good taste,” saysVogue. With an on-air shoutout from Oprah calling the brand “the next big thing in fashion” in 2005 and the late Prince seen wearing a TB tunic at Coachella, Tory Burch was carrying it off. Milestones followed: The Tory Burch Foundation, offering a helping hand to female entrepreneurs, was established in 2009, and starting in Spring 2012, the brand would become a seasonal mainstay on the New York Fashion Week calendar. Per Vogue, “In an impressively short time, Tory Burch has created a $3.5 billion lifestyle brand based on . . . herself.”
Tory Burch Spring 2012
Still, somewhere between Palm Beach, #BamaRush sorority sisters, and double-T medallions, Tory Burch, as Highsnobiety put it, had become “The mistress of the mall, the maven of the mass-market!” And alongside the likes of the Gucci logo belt, the Reva ballet flats and Jack Rogers-esque Miller sandals—shoe staples from Burch—had been branded cheugy.
“When [Burch] launched her Reva ballet flat, her brand soared. But like most trends, [the Reva] with its double-T emblem fell out of favor with the fashionable crowd,” fashion critic Luke Meagher, otherwise known as HauteLeMode, tells Coveteur. “And so it seemed for a while the Tory Burch brand was trying to find some sort of mojo that would put it back on top. While the brand certainly never went away, it did feel like it became just a cog in the American fashion machine alongside the other more commercially-focused brands, rather than experimenting and innovating, like its European counterparts.”
“Tory's signature pieces, like her ballet flat with the medallion, were said to be bringing in incredible profits for the company,” Julie Ann Clauss, founder of the archiving and curation studio The Wardrobe, weighs in. “But people forget that popular and fashionable do not mean the same thing at all. If a piece is totally saturated and seen everywhere, it is now popular and not really fashionable anymore. I think that Tory was at risk of being kind of uncool and too mass.”
Meanwhile, off the commercial market, Burch’s catwalk had stayed inert through the seasons, showing collections of Tory-isms that had become expected. Continues Meagher on Burch’s design sensibility pre-reboot, “I think that Tory generally was just complacent in the mood of the time being a womenswear brand. There are lots of brands that are like that and perform well from a financial standpoint, but discussing ‘interesting’ elements of their brand is also like pulling teeth.”
“Brands need to adapt to changing consumer preferences all the time. Yes—they need to maintain a strong point of view and stay true to what they are known for, or risk alienating their core customers—but fashion must evolve with the times or it becomes a costume,” Clauss notes. “To stay relevant, all brands must evolve. Even very strong 'house codes' or signatures that clients love can't be offered in the same exact same way season after season and be exciting to customers. The true trick is to be able to take those codes or staples that your client base loves, and evolve them with the times. We see this at the blue chip legacy French brands all the time.”
Tory Burch Spring 2022
In 2019, Burch’s husband, Pierre-Yves Roussel, formerly head honcho at LVMH, was named chief executive. At last, Burch could refocus on design. “Over the years, I realized that I was running the business, and in the end, that wasn’t my passion,” Burch told Nylon. “But for so long, I didn’t have the time to make it a real personal expression of me.” Citing change in Spring 2021— a simple collection of poplin blouses, easy caftans, and lightweight wool trousers grounded in the Shaker maxim, beauty rests in utility— she continued, “That was the first collection that I really dedicated 100% of my time to design and the product. Before, I was designing maybe 20% of my time. I went back to a more personal reflection of me.”
Alongside the announcement of the Tory Burch Claire McCardell Fashion Fellowship, Meagher began to take notice of the brand’s sartorial shift starting with Spring 2022—its use of cotton, hooks-and-eyes, and plaids an ode to McCardell. “There was less sense of play and more sense of do, it didn't seem to infantilize women, and refused to shy away from creating shapes through fabric that didn't conform to traditional proportions. It felt in general, like it completely left the ‘WASP-y’ feeling and ideals that the brand was known for off the runway, and embraced the catalog of American woman designers that defied stereotypes and put themselves and their work first. And for a brand that [has] historically been seen as desirable for those that married rich and rode ponies, well it was a stark difference.”
While the brand wouldn’t publicize the change—its unofficial overhaul that changed customer camps en masse from Park Avenue to Dimes Square—in any capacity, the media would: the “Toryssiance.”
“The defining Toryssiance can be pinpointed to Tory Burch’s Spring 2023 RTW Runway Show,” Rachel Glicksberg, Women’s Fashion and New Initiatives Lead at The RealReal, reports to Coveteur. “It marked an impressive turning point for the company that had previously been overlooked by the industry,” she says. “[T]he Tory Burch team hit the nail on the head with their Spring 2023 collection showcasing clothing that represents the modern woman and what she wants to wear, whereas earlier collections didn’t resonate as well.”
The effect on the resale market—particularly at The RealReal— Glicksberg continues, was sizable. “In 2022 post-show, we saw a whopping 43% increase in search for the brand and a 28% increase in demand,” she recounts. “Last year in 2023, the average selling price for Tory Burch’s clothing and shoes was up 11%." She continues to note that this spike points to a new consumer base for the brand thanks to the cultural/primary market discourse. "Think when Beyonce mentioned Telfar in Summer Renaissance, consumers came to us in droves curious about and in search of items from the brand.
"With Tory Burch, the brand is having such a moment on the runway and the red-carpet that a new audience i.e. Gen Z, who were mere babies when Burch first launched, are now discovering the brand for the first time, exploring past season styles available on our site," Glicksberg says. Newer offerings are limited and older styles come at a more accessible price point, which means items from this so-called dead period are selling. It all calls into question the power of cultural commentary as these older styles continue to sell alongside their newer counterparts—perhaps as Michael Kors era Celine moves off the resale shelves on the wave of the Philo era—and the validity of the designs of the past—the 2010's offered more than just Reva flats.
Umberto Fratini / Gorunway.com
But by Fall 2023, headlines agreed: Tory Burch was cool again. It was back to Burch, a woman who built a business twenty years ago, whose style has evolved and elevated over time; no longer just—or only—what she was at the beginning. Clauss opines, “I think in reality, Tory had been taking steps to change the direction of her brand for several years, but Spring 2024 was the watershed collection where things seemed to pop, and it floored a lot of observers. I think many people had the impression that things changed overnight: you went from expecting pieces like quasi-preppy meets boho kaftans, and her signature Reva ballet flat to something a little more fashion-forward. You now hear comparisons of her work to Prada and Hussein Chalayan—that's a really far cry from a 1960s or 70s Palm Beach-inspired aesthetic!”
“The current zeitgeist is dictating to us more and more that we have often disregarded women designers in favor of men designers, and that the idea of creating clothing that a client can actually wear is boring,” enthuses Meagher. “And so when we see a woman designer designing a collection that is not only wearable but also rather fashion forward, we all feel something! It's the nature of fashion, and it will always ebb and flow, but that's really what we sign up for!”
In the past few seasons, Burch’s runway has continued to change course from commercial; a one-time ballet-flat bastion updated for an artful customer. We’ve seen big logos slide off structured bags. Heels have been purposefully broken. Earrings have gone cow-shaped. Daring practicality by way of sleek dressing in shape—a classic overcoat, V-neck sweater, tailored trousers—is seen in new textures, whether lustrous sateen, clanging chainmail, or Nylon taffeta. For SS24, Burch’s retrofuturism took us to the 60’s space age, and FW24—set against the backdrop of the New York Public Library—called for codes ripped straight from the home: A shower curtain raincoat, lampshade skirts, tinsel dresses. These collections are for a modern woman, with a modern sensibility, touch of flair, and cool-girl aplomb—much like Tory herself.
As Burch’s sons like to tease her, “We didn’t know that you went anywhere.”