“I’m not there yet,” says Tory Burch, as a model walks into a conference room wearing a satin jacket in an athletic, boxy shape, with leather twine threaded through eyelets around the collar and hood. On one side of her sits Pookie Burch, associate creative director – and Burch’s stepdaughter – and on the other Brian Molloy, a stylist who has worked with Burch since 2020, just after she took a purely creative role at the company in 2019, relinquishing many of her CEO duties to her husband, Pierre-Yves Roussel.
The satin of the jacket is maybe a little too “maternal evening,” says Pookie, bordering on something heavy like brocade, but she’s sold on the unusual lacing. Burch, not so much, it seems.
The model leaves to change, and Burch has an assistant pull a 19th-century dinner jacket from her archives that she wants her team to study: “It’s oddly relevant in terms of detail.” There is a lot of this playful plumbing of the past in a Tory Burch meeting, a lot of challenging of those around her, and an expectation that they will challenge her too. The model returns, the pants gathered at her sacrum with a clip. “You look a little like Oliver Twist,” Burch says, not unkindly. The model smiles.
Earlier that week, Burch met with me in her office in the same building – a multifloor compound that includes an on-site atelier, a market showroom, and so many other intricate or expansive spaces one could easily get lost wandering through. And though she has told her origin story many times before, she was game to repeat the highlights. “Dad never really had a proper job,” she said as we settled on her office sofa, plates of Thai food perched precariously on our laps. Burch has confidence that is infectious; if she could balance shrimp pad thai on her cream-coloured trousers, then so could I. Silver heels poked out from beneath the hem of her trousers; a button-down shirt was layered under a pigeon grey blazer. Her mother, Reva, was a consummate hostess who became a kind of proto – Martha Stewart, turning willow branches into centrepieces and drying homegrown loofahs for Christmas presents.
The two-century-old house where the family lived in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, had something like 15 bedrooms and was filled with her parents’ finds from flea markets and auctions. At one point, Burch said, they had 35 German shepherds and six cats, as well as an assortment of birds, turtles and ducks scattered across their 50 acres. Burch attended a local Quaker school, where the kids were a bit faster and looser than the tomboy Tory, before her parents sent her to the all-girls prep school Agnes Irwin. She attended the University of Pennsylvania, majored in art history, and spent a semester travelling, which she credits with instilling an underlying sense of philanthropic purpose. Her work ethic comes from her mother: “My mom is the busiest person I’ve ever met and has more energy than I do.” It was also her mother who told her to make her own money.
Her first job after college was for a Yugoslavian designer called Zoran, whose elegant, minimalist clothes her mother had worn. “It was literally me, him, his partner and the sewing room in the back,” she said. The vodka would start at 10am (“He looked like Rasputin,” Burch said), and Zoran wanted his staff to all conform to his preferred aesthetic: no make-up, flats, short hair. She was often charged with politely dispensing with unwanted visitors when her boss was hiding in the back. At Harper’s Bazaar, where she worked next, she learned how a shoot worked and to never address Geoffrey Beene (or anyone) by their first name unless invited to do so.
A career in fashion unfolded – positions at Ralph Lauren, Vera Wang and Loewe – and in 1996 she married the successful entrepreneur J Christopher Burch. He had three young daughters, Pookie, Izzie and Louisa, and they became Tory’s girls as well. Pookie recalls first meeting Tory when she was in the swimming pool of her father’s Hamptons house. “This woman walked by – I remember what she was wearing – and started talking to me and my sisters, and I remember at the time being like, ‘I really like this person.’ I felt a sense of safety immediately.” Tory would have three sons with Chris Burch, twins Henry and Nicholas, born in 1997, and Sawyer, born in 2001.
Working while her children were very young proved a challenge. “Women have to make choices, and I don’t think men do,” Burch tells me bluntly. She became a stay-at-home mother for a while, which she now looks back on fondly: “Playing tennis every day – it was kind of great.” But this is someone who, by her own admission, doesn’t need much sleep, and ideas for various ventures were always percolating.
