Tory Burch brought fashion out to Fort Greene, Brooklyn on Monday night to see her Spring/Summer 2026 collection inside a historic old bank space, where the muted pinks, reds and greens splashed across the floor to ceiling stone and tile matched the soft hues of her collection. Notable guests like Naomi Watts, Jessica Alba, Emma Roberts, Ciara, Chloe Fineman and Thom Browne passed through the crowds thronged outside of the venue, as Burch’s shows attract more fanfare with each season.
Burch wanted this collection to feel “feminine, but sophisticated and precise”, she told me the Sunday before at her Manhattan studio, reflecting different facets of womanhood with pieces like a polka-dot drop-waist dress with a beaded fringe and a blazer inspired by an old suit jacket that belonged to her father. There is colour: a lipstick pink jersey frock; a canary yellow jacket that Burch designed to evoke the classic raincoats we wore as children; a tank top and skirt set rumpled to make it look like the wearer just got out of bed. She wanted the collection to feel light and optimistic, “especially when you consider everything that’s going on in the world”.
What Burch seems most proud of this season is the embroidery: dresses and sweaters are woven with beading, all of which was done by hand at her atelier. A chocolate brown sweater is adorned with birds in a satisfying blend of pink, blue and purple beads; the show’s final pieces put embroidery to work on two midi dresses. A sweater and a dress are covered in a smattering of initials — all of her design team’s, she says.
It’s all done at the Tory Burch atelier, situated in the same building as her office and studio. To have access to local artisans in-house changed everything about her design process, Burch says. “It’s brought us to where we are today,” she says. On Sunday, CEO (and Burch’s husband since 2018) Pierre-Yves Roussel enters the studio after visiting the atelier, and he’s abuzz over the exacting craftsmanship he saw upstairs.
The atelier opened in 2019, just before the pandemic, at a transformational point for Burch’s business. She had just brought on Roussel, a former LVMH executive, as CEO after convincing him to relocate to the US from Paris — which Burch says was a “four-year conversation”. The two met in 2015, when Roussel looked into investing in Burch’s business (apart from an early friends and family round, Tory Burch is entirely self-funded). With Roussel on board, Burch transitioned her role to executive chair and chief creative officer. Previously, she was the company’s CEO since founding the brand in 2004.
With the atelier up and running, and Roussel leading the business side, Burch’s newest phase kicked into motion. Speaking from her airy office — Burch is curled up on an orange velvet couch with Roussel next to her — she says she had the realisation back in 2015 that she wanted to change the way she works. Burch launched Tory Sport around that time, requiring her to delve deep into the design and reigniting her love for the creative process; it launched as an entirely separate entity, with a different supply chain, team, branding and logo, which she says led to confusion down the road and, in hindsight, wasn’t the right approach. (Sport has now been worked back into the main brand.) She also says that prior to launching Tory Sport, she had started to hear from some customers that her designs no longer felt on-brand.
“That was pretty shocking to hear, because I didn’t feel that way. But if people felt that way, I knew we needed to change it up,” Burch says. “Things were being presented that didn’t fit the mould, and the last thing I think is that women should be put into a box.”
So she made changes that helped to unlock a renewed sense of creativity. Now, it’s not exactly an entirely new era for Burch (the brand’s Reva flat, first introduced in 2006, was relaunched this spring), but rather a refreshing redirection that makes hers one of the most exciting, if longstanding, shows on the New York calendar. Already a global brand, her plan is to continue improving on the path she’s laid. “From show to show, I never want to be one thing one season and a completely different thing the next,” Burch says. “It’s more like an ongoing dialogue around what inspires me about women – their strength, fragility and femininity. And the way they take things from us and make it their own.”
Billion-dollar Burch
Burch launched her business in 2004 after spending years working for Vera Wang, Ralph Lauren, and Loewe under Narciso Rodriguez. With an online store and a shop in New York’s Nolita neighbourhood, Burch was early to the direct-to-consumer (DTC) model when most designers were entirely reliant on wholesale. That, plus a fast jump into international sales with a store in Japan in 2009 and a lifestyle-brand approach to offshoot categories including home and fragrance, formed the basis for what’s now a $1.8 billion profitable business (as reported by Forbes last year; the brand doesn’t share sales figures) with nearly 400 stores across the world and a foundation that launched in 2009 and has facilitated more than $100 million in low-interest loans to women entrepreneurs in partnership with Bank of America.
That growth trajectory — rare in fashion, with few recent examples to name in regards to contemporary brands — is partially what distracted Burch away from design, as she was busy building the business. After repositioning herself, she achieved what other brands typically do via firings and hirings.
“The traditional model is that you change the designer every five years, right? But being able to reinvent yourself from within, in your own brand, it’s pretty remarkable,” Roussel says.
With Burch focused primarily on design, her collections have become more interesting. She’s gaining traction among younger customers, but hasn’t thrown out the book on what made her popular among her original fanbase, either. Burch’s recent styles, like the pierced shoes and the new Romy handbag, have fuelled what fashion media dubbed a “Toryssaince” over the past several seasons, celebrating the designer’s comeback. When I mention the idea of a comeback, she gives me a slightly weary look.
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“I said to my boys [Burch’s three sons], I didn’t know I went anywhere,” Burch says with a smirk. “But I’m thrilled that we are getting recognition for the work that we do, and I have such an incredible team that has been with me the whole time. So for me, it’s wonderful to see that as soon as I took over the creative role. It was something that I’m very proud of.”
The renaissance is in part propelled by the brand’s price positioning. As luxury brands have raised prices, Burch has stuck to her spot in the market with a more accessible price point and says she’s been able to rethink every product “from a design perspective and quality perspective”.
“We have a gigantic opportunity there,” says Roussel. “We get a lot of customers that are either trading up from brands they want to have better quality or design, and they’re willing to pay more for that. And we’re getting a lot of luxury customers that are looking at prices [on the market] and saying, ‘OK, this bag was half the price a year ago.’”
Burch is also proud of her position as an American designer. “People don t give America what America deserves,” she says. “When they’ve been inspired by our sportswear, or our streetstyle, the entertainment industry. I m very proud to be an American designer, and I’m proud of other American designers, because there’s a lot of creativity here.”
It’s a different industry today for American designers than the one Burch started out in, she agrees, but she sees possibility for designers to take the reins and carve out their own path. When she started her online store, it wasn’t the norm. She sees similar change happening with AI today as how the internet revolutionised the industry. “I brought it to a design meeting and it was like I introduced the plague. People were horrified,” Burch says. “And I said, you guys, we need to get on the bandwagon here and understand AI, and how it can be a tool for creativity, not a replacement. If we aren t using AI for efficiency, we re going to be left behind.”
Maintaining momentum
From here, Burch says she’s set on maintaining the momentum that she picked up five years ago. She and Roussel believe there’s still plenty of white space to grow the business, in terms of regions and categories. The brand is working on updating its store concept and branding, as seen in its Rodeo Drive store. Burch feels she was early to fashion’s shift into full-fledged lifestyle brands, with 10 categories at launch.
She thinks there’s still new territory the brand could enter; she has a home line that is small, but is a clear passion point she might want to grow down the line. (In her office, I’m sitting on an antique chair she found on Live Auctioneers, where she says she spends the nights she can’t sleep.) But she’s not thinking about launching entirely new categories — instead, she’d rather improve on the ones she has. “I love the idea of American sportswear and always twisting it and playing with dichotomies and things that don’t necessarily go together,” she says.
One thing that doesn’t go: menswear. “We’re not planning on launching a men’s collection,” Roussel says, possibly anticipating the question. “And we still have plenty of room to grow.” How big exactly?
“We don’t wake up in the morning and say, ‘OK, we want to be a $5 billion or $10 billion brand,” Roussel says. “Sometimes, if brands grow at a crazy rate, you end up with a hangover, because you’ve over expanded, and then you have to go through a pretty tough time to swallow this whole expansion.”
Monday’s runway show puts Burch’s forward-looking goals on display. She considers the runway collection an “innovation lab” that pushes her creatively, which then trickles down to the commercial collection. She’s amassed a mini army of Tory Girls that help to build the buzz, Fineman and Roberts; each season, a group of celebrities and influencers sit front row, wearing different versions of the handbag or shoe the brand wants to put front and centre. This season, it’s the Romy bag, a slouchier shoulder bag already seen on the arms of Michelle Williams, Ciara and the likes. Closing the show was a song Burch on Sunday says she thinks will make the tired fashion masses laugh, several days into NYFW: “All I Do Is Work” by Kurtis Perrie. It’s fitting for Burch.
“I think we’re still a work in progress, and I think we’ll always be that. I’m always pushing forward and always thinking about what we can be doing differently or better, but it’s kind of a dialogue that we keep going. And I look at that even from show to show, and I never want to be one thing one show, and a completely different thing the next,” she says. “For me, it’s like this ongoing dialogue around women and what inspires me about women and their strength and their fragility and their femininity and the way they take things from us and make it their own.”
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