“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-colored trousers, then so could I. Silver heels poked out from beneath the hem of her pants; a button-down shirt was layered under a pigeon gray blazer. Her mother, Reva, was a consummate hostess who became a kind of proto–Martha Stewart, turning willow branches into centerpieces 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 traveling, 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 10 a.m. (“He looked like Rasputin,” Burch said), and Zoran wanted his staff to all conform to his preferred aesthetic: no makeup, 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.
From its inception in 2004, Tory Burch projected an idea of leisure and refinement, outfits that could be worn while pruning the hydrangeas of an estate but were also beloved by suburban moms making midday trips to Kroger. Gallery owner Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, a friend for many decades, remembers Burch showing her some of her father’s golf sweaters very early on: “She had this notion of an old-world Americana sportswear that people wore in country clubs. She understood that there was a niche business missing, and she wanted it affordable.”
The languorous aesthetics that the brand radiates can obscure just how much scrappy hustle it took to get it off the ground. The company’s first investors were friends and family, who were asked to put in “only what they could afford to lose,” Burch says, which was sometimes just a few thousand dollars. Even then, Burch had an idea that she wanted a broader purpose for the business. “I’ll never forget, I sat on the couch of one of our first investors and I said, ‘I want to start a global lifestyle brand so I can start a foundation.’ And he was like, ‘Don’t ever say that.’” (The Tory Burch Foundation was officially launched in 2009 and has distributed $2 million in grants to female business owners and more than $100 million through a loan program with partners like Bank of America; its current goal is to add $1 billion to the economy through its support of female entrepreneurs by 2030.)
As the company grew, Burch desperately wanted to keep her personal life separate from her professional one, and that wariness made her closed off at times, she acknowledges. But she had good reason to desire privacy: She and Chris Burch were going through a protracted divorce. (They’re now friends.) When I ask her what she thinks people misunderstand about her past, it’s the idea that she strolled into success. “I think people have this perception that things were easier,” Burch says. “But just physically, the amount of work, and the hours from eight in the morning to ten at night, every night. Sometimes falling asleep at four in the morning, and doing it all with little babies.”
“The idea that women have to do more with less,” says the businesswoman and financier Mellody Hobson, now a good friend of Burch’s, “it’s just a given. We don’t even talk about that.” When we met in her office, Burch discussed this time in her life with some care, aware that she did not want to complain while sitting on her plush sofa, sipping a Diet Coke, with cloth napkins set out by her assistants. “What I’m saying,” she articulated, “is that it was excruciating, the amount of work it took to build this company. And women are held to different standards.”
We are in a distinctly different chapter now. Culturally, in terms of the way we think about female founders, but also in terms of the magnitude of Burch’s company: Forbes estimates that Tory Burch’s sales were $1.8 billion in 2024; there are 400 stores around the world and 13 global e-commerce sites. She has long since paid back all her original investors: “It’s changed a lot of people’s circumstances,” she says succinctly. The biggest recent change, of course, was the 2018 marriage to Roussel and his joining of the company as CEO in 2019.
Roussel, a tall and dashing figure when I meet him at Burch’s offices in New York, tells me that he never anticipated that he would work with his wife. Growing up in Paris, the son of a doctor and a psychologist, he ended up in banking, then shifted to consulting, and finally arrived at LVMH, where he worked directly with Bernard Arnault managing acquisitions and matching creative talent to brands.
Roussel first met Burch at the Ritz in Paris for a business breakfast with a banker in tow. He was impressed, but never heard back when he wrote to tell her so. A connection developed after Burch invited him to a show more than a year later. They became friends, and then more than friends.
They were married with a series of celebrations that reflected the worlds they were combining. There was a rehearsal dinner in Paris and a ceremony at the town hall in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Then they escaped for another party and ceremony in Antigua, where Burch had famously rehabilitated the estate belonging to Bunny Mellon. To that point they’d commuted between New York and Paris. But they decided, after the marriage, that Roussel, still working for LVMH, was going to need to move to New York and give up his position, and this is when the boundaries between work and home grew porous. “She was asking me all of the time, ‘Okay, should we do this and that?’” he remembers. “So I said, ‘If she brings someone in and I have to manage the brand in the evening from home on weekends, I’d rather do it myself.’”
In the blunt framework of Daniel Kahneman: Burch thinks fast, while Roussel is more methodical. She tends to have ideas at night, while he processes things in the morning. “They’re able to push each other,” says Pookie, “as both businesspeople and as a couple.” It’s a dynamic Burch has fostered before with those closest to her: “Together we typically find the right balance,” says Burch’s brother Robert Isen, who joined the company four years after it started and who is now the chief legal officer and president of corporate development; “fortunately she does not always listen to me.”
Roussel’s time at the company has also aligned with a period deemed the so-called Toryssaince—a celebrated shift toward less demure designs, occasionally off-kilter silhouettes, edgier accessories, and an expanding minimalism. Not coincidentally, this has been a time when Burch has been focused purely on the creative side of the company. “I think we became known for certain things and people didn’t necessarily see other things we were doing,” she says. “Designers get pigeonholed and put into a box. Now people are seeing beyond that.”
Ultimately, the harmony between Roussel and Burch seems less to do with the yin-yang of the professional energies and more to do with how they approach life with broad appetites for art, literature, architecture, politics, Formula 1 racing. (Roussel is on the board of McLaren and chats with me about the Brad Pitt blockbuster F1: compelling but a bit long, he says.) “It would have been a problem if we only had fashion to talk about,” says Roussel.
Which brings us to Burch’s glorious new home in Paris—in a way the fullest embodiment of her new life—a foothold in the city that has been Roussel’s home for most of his life, a base for both of them, and a fresh canvas for an evolving aesthetic. Located on two west-facing, entry-level floors with a tiered rear garden, the apartment is adjacent to a structure that serves as the home of the cardinal of Paris. (It’s thought that the apartment was carved off from the church some 60 or 70 years ago.) The most common sounds, when you’re standing in the garden, are the peals of bells or children playing at a nearby school. From the top floors, windows frame a Japanese maple, a citrus tree imported from Marseille, and trellises covered by jasmine and creeping hydrangea.
The apartment is more pared back than some of Burch’s other spaces—with their supersaturated palettes, their busy concord of prints, arrays of chinoiserie vases—but there is still evidence of her refined eclecticism: an Arts and Crafts–era table from a Paris antiques shop, a 1920s Lalique pendant light found in a flea market, a 17th-century canvas next to a mask by contemporary artist Romuald Hazoumè. “This is a departure from what she has done before,” says the architect and designer Daniel Romualdez, who has worked with Burch on many other projects. (Burch and Roussel worked with Milan-based Studio Peregalli Sartori on the structural plans, while Romualdez was focused on interiors.) It unsettled Romualdez at the outset: “I teased her at one point,” he says. “I said, ‘Maybe we’re growing apart.’ And then, of course, you figure it out, and it ends up being my favorite collaboration.” There is still a strong thread of storytelling—always important to Burch: The fabric that covers the headboard and canopy of her bed, bedroom curtains, and reupholstered Louis XVI chairs was inspired by an 18th-century men’s vest Burch discovered in the archives of the historic French fabric company Le Manach—and is a tribute to Marie Antoinette’s apartment at the Petit Trianon. (A silvery dress Burch designed for Pamela Anderson to wear to the Met Gala, paired with Anderson’s new micro-bangs haircut, alluded to Joan of Arc. “The dress was like armor,” Anderson tells me, “and probably just as heavy.”)
But more important than the things they have filled their house with, it’s a home for their children and grandchildren. “We talked a lot about that in the beginning,” says Roussel of their large blended family. “We felt, we really believe deeply, that it would be a great adventure for all of them.” The house or the marriage? Both, Roussel answers, but “the house is a brick in this.”
I see the house the day before it will be photographed for this story. Burch waves to me when I enter, but she’s occupied, attending to 10 things at once—calmly. Multitasker would be the generic word, but that belies her innate, unpretentious efficiency: “Tory has one of the skills that I think the most successful people in the world have,” says the artist Rashid Johnson, who is a friend and worked with her on a dress that the director Janicza Bravo wore to the Met this year. “She’s very easy to get in touch with.”
Romualdez arrives, as does the garden designer Madison Cox, who has (unexpectedly) brought with him a few old friends. Pookie, here in stepdaughter capacity, informs Burch that there are only eight places set at the dinner table and nine people; she suggests she and her friend Kate McCollough, a design consultant who often works for Burch (and sister of designer Jack McCollough), could head off to eat elsewhere. The idea is quickly dismissed; an extra setting is added. There are large terra-cotta pots lining the steps of the garden filled with foamflower, “mermaid” lavender, and salvia. “Tory has a very strong, really precise sense of what she likes and what she doesn’t like,” says Cox. “The palette is really coming from her.”
The food is ready. “I’ve been working in the kitchen all day,” Burch says dryly to me. She definitely has not been cooking all day, but someone has. An heirloom-tomato salad appears, alongside steak, asparagus, thinly sliced potatoes, cod with mussels in a creamy red sauce, a flan-like cheesecake with blueberries for dessert. We’re just past the longest day of the year, and the light lingers until almost 10 p.m.; the candles in their hurricane lamps casting just the faintest glow against the lavender sky. The church bells chime and doves swoop from the branches.
“Pierre-Yves is over there having his dessert,” Burch says when he crunches across the pebbles to another corner of the garden for a cigar at the end of the dinner.
“It’s a short one,” he says, waving the stub of it at her.
The next morning, people with slipcovers over their shoes are shuffling from one room to another, setting up cameras on tripods, but Burch is serene. “I’m a very peaceful person,” she says. And she has a right to feel more genuinely sanguine than at many moments in her past. “I’ve never had a time in my life to focus on work in the way that I have had the last eight or seven years,” she says. “It was just so chaotic—wonderful chaos—but the chaos of having six kids, building a business. It was just so much.”
What will receive her attention and energy now? There is all of her design work, of course, but also: Women still need a bit of bucking up, she senses, speaking carefully. “On the one hand, they’re feeling powerful and confident, and on the other hand, absolutely not.” AI is being engineered to be anti-women, she points out with exasperation as just one example of many that I sense she is mulling late at night while her neurons are still firing. “She wants to uplift women in how they look and feel,” Hobson told me, “but she very much wants to uplift them in terms of their everyday circumstances.” Women are “shaken in their confidence,” Burch says. “In my opinion, women have taken a step back, and that’s something that I want to try to help fix if I can.” She has sat with me for hours at this point, telling a story about the near and not-so-near past, but I sense that she is more accustomed to facing forward. “You look at life and you see, What am I learning from this?” she asks, still a student after all these years of all there is to contemplate and appreciate and build.
In this story: hair, Michael Johnson; makeup, Berta Camal. Produced by Kitten Production. Florals by Rana Kim.
