Tory Burch LLC (Q1933)
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Fashion Brand
- TRB by Tory Burch
- Tory Burch
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Tory Burch LLC |
Fashion Brand |
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Statements
5 references
Tory Burch transformed the atrium of the Domino Sugar Factory—Skylight at the Refinery is its official new name—into a pool, with walls and floor in aqua tiles. We were a dozen stories in the air and underwater at the same time, which is fitting because backstage Burch was talking about opposites: “power and grace, precision and freedom.” Maybe it was a case of Olympics fever—she said she was thinking about sport.This wasn't unfamiliar territory for Burch; she launched Tory Sport six years ago. Here, though, she was less focused on performance wear and more on aesthetics, from the shoes right on up. Across from the Vogue bench, Michelle Williams, Jodie Turner-Smith, Elizabeth Olsen, and other celebrities all wore fall 2024’s pierced pump (arriving in stores next month). This season’s shoe comes with a peep-toe and a sculptural “twisted” heel. No locker room flip-flops here.But that exception aside, there were many athletic elements at play. The most obvious were the tank bathing suits and the drawstring waist karate pants they were worn with. Other pieces made subtler reference to sport, like the jersey dresses with contrasting shoulder panels that called to mind American football, and the stretch wool gauze shirts with the vertical stripes of rest-of-the-world football jerseys.The most surprising pieces were the skirts with malleable wire waistbands, which arced out, rather than gripped the midsection—surprising because the waist is rarely an area that women want to add inches to. In contrast, the narrow flecked wool pants with full breaks over those peep toe pumps looked elegant with both shrunken quilted wool and silk jackets and traditional wrap jacket styles. The show closed with a trio of looks combining sleeveless muscle tees and softly draped and ruffled asymmetric jersey chiffon skirts that lived up to Burch’s “power and grace” concept.Athleticism and sports are a running theme this week. The gutsiest move on Burch’s part just might be the return of the Reva ballet flat, the shoe that launched her business into the stratosphere way back when but hasn’t been seen on the runway in some time. Can she make it a fashion shoe again? She’s giving it a try with peekaboo logo Ts at the toes. Bold.
9 September 2024
A dress from Tory Burch’s last resort collection was in the Costume Institute’s “Women Dressing Women” exhibition earlier this year. Based on a ballerina’s tutu, its sheer stretch tulle bodice and floating skirt have a casual yet sensual vibe that feels classic but also contemporary: the love child of a Roman toga and a barre class outfit, maybe.Casual but sensual definitely applies to the stretch mesh leotards and bike shorts that form the foundation of Burch’s new resort. At a showroom preview she said she was thinking about “spontaneity,” and the way women throw on new-season and old, day with evening, and maybe even a cocktail dress with exercise clothes. You can peep the mesh bodysuit and shorts under the slinky black number near the end of the lookbook.A sense of eclecticism runs through this collection. The garment that opens the lookbook, for example—is it a shirt or a jacket? In striped cotton poplin, the term shirt qualifies, but a couple of looks later, the same silhouette in a black wool-cotton blend is most definitely a jacket. There is much experimentation with materials here. A burgundy trench and cinnamon-red skirt that look like ostrich are actually plated cotton. The shaggy mohair car coat? Turns out it’s brushed viscose. And would you believe a laser-cut coat and matching skirt started out as upholstery fabric?Burch made a point of highlighting the pants. “I’m very excited about them, they’ve taken a long time to perfect,” she said. The cargoes that accompany those shackets have a pronounced slouch, but she also showed a culotte-length style with an a-line flair. Most unique are the barrel-shaped trousers in a velvet dévoré repeat pattern spelling out “sublime,” in a callback to her fall ’24 runway.
3 June 2024
Tory Burch’s first store opened 20 years ago last week; it marked the start of her brand. A spate of profiles timed to the milestone have appeared across the media. In the interview she gave this publication, she said, “I think I’m more apt to explore my vulnerability now than I ever was before—vulnerability from a design perspective and putting myself out there taking risks.”She gathered us at the New York Public Library tonight and sent out a runway full of experiments. Though still rooted in practicality, she pushed out of her comfort zone, both in terms of fabrications, which she made great efforts to keep light, and in terms of shapes, which were spare and geometric, or as effusive as pom-poms. Risk is too strong a word for it, but there was daring in what Burch was up to. Let’s just say she’s come a long way from the people-pleasing crystal embellished tunics and Reva flats that were her earliest successes.She made her ambitions clear from the first look, a sequined fringe dress that looked conventional from the waist up, but was shaped by bonding and wire through the skirt so that it retained the trapezoidal shape of a lampshade. Then she went on to apply the same technique to a pair of sleeveless top and skirt combinations, the first in a brown faux croc and the second in a tan jacquard woven with the word ‘sublime.’ “I was thinking: ‘How do you make the everyday sublime,’” she said backstage.Other investigations weren’t as extreme, but still signaled a desire to be playful, like the shiny tinsel coats (stand-ins, of a sort, for the fur coats of old), and the trio of smocked nylon taffeta dresses printed with polka dots and four-leaf clovers that were modeled on shower caps, of all things. In a week that’s been short of color, Burch had vivid orange and sky blue lampshade skirts, and all sorts of glossy surfaces, including an intriguing distressed vinyl that will crinkle and fade the more it’s worn that she used for bodysuits.She played it straight too, with tailored men’s pants cinched at the sides via velcro closures and slender zip-front jackets, but the story here was her appetite for the oddball gesture. It’s a new side of Burch we’re seeing. “I feel like in a way, we’re just beginning,” she said in our interview. “I don’t really look back at the last 20 years at all, I look at it as a journey, but I feel like we’re just starting where I want to be.”
12 February 2024
There must’ve been a lot of jockeying for first dibs on the American Museum of Natural History’s photogenic new Gilder Center. Its swooping ceilings and porthole skylights are built like a canyon, but if there’s something geologic about it, it also feels like outer space. It’s slightly reminiscent, in that way, of Pierre Cardin’s Palais Bulles, which is built into a cliff in the south of France.Tory Burch scored the prize and held her show in the museum’s new wing tonight. Maybe it was the center’s transportive atmosphere, but I saw space age aspects to her new collection. They were there in the crinoline rings that formed the bouncy hems of viscose knit dresses, in the uniform-like sensibility of the collarless bonded jersey jackets she paired with super-short minis, and in the ergonomically designed molded plastic handbags. Burch herself said nothing about the space age. Rather, she said she’d been thinking about what “effortless” means now. She liked the idea of clothing that “frees up your mind.”Burch’s study of Claire McCardell launched her down this path two years ago. Over the seasons since, her talking points have revolved around a similar theme: Clothes should unencumber you, not complicate your life. Her one rule is that there are no rules.Did this collection live up to those principles? The thigh-high hems conveyed a carefree, youthful attitude, especially since they were paired with flat shoes, but the plunging U-necks, held in place with what looked like tie clips, might not prove as easy to wear. Nylon taffeta zip polos worn with tech-y pants got closer to the effortlessness she said she was aiming for. A coat, coatdress, and skirt suit with stand-away collars had a more retro look, in keeping with the ’60s influences we’ve seen elsewhere this week.In comparison with Burch’s recent collections, there were a lot more embellishments here, even taking the form of a chainmail tunic strung with bells that jingled as the model walked by. It might not be the most practical of garments, but another thing Burch has been cultivating is her sense of play. The earrings in looks 7 and 12? Those were cows, no explanation given. As for all those crinoline rings, Burch explained that she liked taking what once held women back and turning them into something freeing. Into possibilities. We all can get with that.
11 September 2023
Tory Burch is a dog person, her beloved miniature poodles Chicken and Slim have their own Instagram account. But cats and rabbits have their moment in the spotlight in her new resort collection. Burch appreciates the 87-year-old German artist Walter Schels’s animal portraits, and approached him for the project. The cat, which is photographed with its mouth open and eyes blazing, captures something of our frenetic time.Burch herself is always in motion, which might be why she’s been leaning into stretch fabrics and lean, almost athletic shapes recently. Last September at her spring show she introduced a modular concept that combined a stretch top and tube skirt with capri-length leggings, or teamed a stretch top and a part-opaque, part-sheer skirt. For resort, there’s a pair of dresses that recreate the color-blocking of those looks—same big impact but in a couldn’t-be-easier all-in-one shape. The deep-v sweaters accompanied by sheer turtleneck dickeys here do the same thing: You get the look of layers in one completist piece. (Unlike traditional dickeys, these aren’t detachable.)“I wanted clean lines,” Burch said at a showroom appointment. That translated to aerodynamic jersey tees and narrow skirts shown in monochrome white or navy blue punctuated only with a studded hip-slung belt, or to a leather handkerchief top embellished with more of those silver studs paired with mannish, straight-cut trousers. The tailoring is minimal and stripped of any visible hardware.Minimal but sensual is the message behind a trio of special dresses that take their cues from ballerina’s tutus. Combining a stretch tulle bodice with a fluid skirt draped from curved underwire, they don’t cling to the body but rather seem to float on top of it. Pairing them with skimmer flats, Burch seemed to be returning to a point she’s been driving home for a couple of years now, that for this designer comfort and glamour are inextricably intertwined.
6 June 2023
The pleated wool skirt in Tory Burch’s opening look was held together with a large safety pin, the waistband more than an inch or two askew. In the looks that followed, satin dresses were worn back-to-front, belts were barely holding on, pumps walked out with one broken heel (“a feat or engineering,” Burch said), and it looked like one of the double Ts on a handbag had come loose.Burch was toying with the notion of perfection. “I wanted to challenge the concept of traditional femininity and beauty and twist it,” she said. Why? “I don’t think women want rules anymore.” Burch herself would seem to be chafing against them. Since the pandemic, she’s been talking up Claire McCardell, the American sportswear pioneer who gave women the popover dress 75 years ago, and channeling the freedom of her own early years in the New York of the 1990s with stretchy mix-and-match layers. She was tapping into similar instincts here with sweaters that featured pre-scrunched sleeves and power mesh dresses with built-in padding to accentuate the hips—useful wardrobe shortcuts stripped of old-fashioned proprieties.It’s hard to imagine those padded hips in a Tory Burch collection of five years ago, but even as she’s become more daring (she handed over control of the business side of the brand to her husband Pierre Yves Roussel in 2019, thus freeing her to focus on design), she’s doubled-down on practicality. The building blocks of this collection—handsome sweaters and midi skirts, neatly cut blazers, button-downs, and straight-leg trousers—would look familiar to McCardell. The outerwear in particular was strong; a navy peacoat with a brown shearling collar and a wool tweed coat with what looked like more of that padding at the hips were two of the stars.For evening, Burch’s proposal was to expose the thing that women traditionally hide—their shapewear. This idea worked insofar that the power mesh and satin camisoles were modeled on mid-century styles, when indeed those unmentionables were kept firmly under wraps. Women today, of course, expose their shapewear every time they leave the house in a job bra and performance leggings. But with their stitched floral appliqués and undone hooks and eyes they did prove Burch’s point: that we’re perfectly imperfect and that vulnerability can be our strength.
14 February 2023
Tory Burch wrote a new forward to a just-released re-edition of a book by Claire McCardell, the mid-century designer known for easy-on, easy-off dresses when high fashion was still a made-to-measure business. A year ago Burch was talking up McCardell’s designs and the ways in which they served to “unencumber” women. Aesthetically, today, Burch switched gears, but philosophically, she’s more aligned with McCardell than ever.“I started thinking about when I first moved to New York in the ’90s,” said Burch. “Even then, women didn’t want to be restricted, so we spent a lot of time developing fabrics that had all kinds of stretch and pieces that you could wear in different ways. I wanted it to be really focused.”We were at an enormous pier on the Hudson with the sun setting over New Jersey, a breeze blowing off the river, and the lights of the city twinkling. The models skimmed along in flat slingbacks or mules—“If the shoe hurts, give it away,” is a McCardellism. They wore a modular wardrobe of fine gauge knits, double layer skirts (the fitted upper part covering a sheer lower part that hit the mid-calf), or tube skirts over capri-length leggings. These looks didn’t obscure or deny a woman’s form, but nor did they enhance it necessarily. The best way to put it is that they were true to a woman’s body, and they exuded a certain confidence because of it.Tossed over the top could be a boxy man’s blazer, or a gold leather jacket, or a tech-y fabric raincoat. The effect was streamlined and simple, but not quite minimal. There was too much color and, when the evening looks emerged at the end, too much ornament to qualify for that. Burch’s more formal outfits combined a tunic-length hourglass-shaped sleeveless top in suiting fabric with a soft lace-edged slip, or layered a sheer panel over a slip dress that could be cut from sari fabric or embellished with mirror paillettes.McCardell’s reissued book is calledWhat Shall I Wear? The What, Where, When, and How Much of Fashion. She didn’t have much to say about denim, but we will say this, Burch’s jeans—high-waisted and faded, with the hint of a crease down the front—are the best of the season so far.
13 September 2022
“You can only control so much in your life at the moment, and one of the things you can control is the way you dress and how you look. I think that’s an incredible creative outlet. Individual creative expression is what I’m really interested in right now.”A year ago, the experience of the pandemic led Tory Burch to Claire McCardell, a post-war designer celebrated for the chic functionality of her dresses. Fast forward to 2022—the pandemic is ongoing, there’s war in Eastern Europe, the US Congress is deadlocked over gun control, and a recession looms. The news is no better, but Burch is in a different place. She’s leaning more eccentric—freer, maybe—and it comes across in ways small and not so small in her new collection.Starting with the details, maybe you’ve noticed the plastic charms fringing the waistline of her cropped jackets, or the parachute lining peeking from underneath her a-line skirts (it’s removable, by the way), or the lurex fuzz of her popover knits. These are the building blocks of the Tory Burch wardrobe, but they’re not square or boring. Quite the opposite.A sense of play permeates the season, whether it’s the raffia tassels that accent the baggy cargo pants she paired with a sleeveless tweed peplum top or the two-piece dress consisting of a little wrap shirt over a yoke-waist skirt with lots of volume (padding at the hips and hem give it shape). Most experimental are a pair of party looks whose tops and skirts are cut on the round with zig-zag edges trimmed in beads. In mismatched but complementary floral prints, these outfits put the emphasis on craft and quirk. Though it’s rooted in American sportswear, with its mix-and-match possibilities, the collection wears its utility lightly. It looks like a lot of fun.
6 June 2022
A lot has been written about the pandemic’s effect on our wardrobes, most of it about sweatpants. But the shifts are more nuanced than that. We started clocking changes last year after the vaccine roll-out, in our second Covid summer. Walking down any street in the Lower East Side or Bushwick or name the neighborhood, you saw them: women dressed to the nines, or in rule-breaking mixes, or in very little clothing at all. The freedom of expression was what you noticed—not trends, but characters. Tory Burch has picked up on it too. “I see women in New York taking more risks, they’re more creative with the way they put themselves together,” she said after her show. “It’s all ages, and that’s something I really appreciate.”Burch tapped into that energy for her new fall collection, which she set against a backdrop of midtown Manhattan, with red light from the New Yorker Hotel sign glancing off the runway, like neon reflecting on rainy streets. The idea, she explained, “was to give women a toolbox; I want them to feel they can take this collection and create their own personality with it.”The variety was the thing. After last season’s laser focus on dresses, this collection had range; there were tech-knit track jackets worn with high-waisted, tapering pants and voluminous jackets and skirts reined in with dramatic belts.Because a coat is all-important in a city like New York where we walk everywhere (in L.A. it’s your car), Burch doubled down on outerwear. Sasha Pivovarova wore a wool coat on top of a hooded raincoat. Bouclé coats had drop shoulders, for easier layering. All of it skimmed out on low-heeled mules or boots, another reflection of real-life chic.There was nothing as predictable as a cocktail dress. Instead, embellished T-shirts were layered over jersey turtlenecks (turtlenecks being fall 2022’s absolute must-have) and Lurex-shot full skirts. Burch also paired embroidered bustiers and baggy pants in a cotton-linen shantung with day-to-night versatility. In all likelihood, it’ll be the lively colored geometric pattern jersey dresses—clingy, cut on the bias for ease—that become the collection’s big movers. For the days when the closet is too daunting, or there’s just not enough time for putting together a look, they’re a one-and-done solution for channeling a confident New York vibe.
14 February 2022
What makes a great summer dress, one you return to week after week and year after year? It’s in the mix of simplicity and surprise, but getting that combination right isn’t as easy as it sounds; simplicity can read boring and surprises can go wrong. Tory Burch has a sensation of a summer dress on her hands. Cut from unpretentious black cotton with a full skirt and an asymmetric, one-shoulder bodice, it’s easygoing and airy; the delightful detail is the smocked midriff in tie-dye.At her terrific fall show, Burch was talking up mid-century American designer Claire McCardell and her can-do American sportswear. Pre-fall picks up where that runway collection left off, with uncomplicated pieces elevated by graphic patterns; a pretty, summery palette; and compelling gestures like a dip-dyed cashmere crewneck twisted and pinned at the neckline and a technical knit shrug worn crisscross across the spine.The collection glances back at McCardell’s mid-century hourglass-ish shape, but with modern details, not least of all at the feet: Most of the open-toe sandals are flat, and the ones that aren’t have a low architectural heel. A stretch-knit tube is layered over a checked dress, to add definition without being constricting, and a halter dress is seamed at the torso in the manner of a corset, only without the old-fashioned boning. In surprising color combinations with graphic three-dimensional patterns, knit separates like polos and slim knee-length skirts might be easiest of all—and definitely not boring.
16 December 2021