The inaugural Tory Burch Foundation Embrace Ambition Summit was a feel-good day of speeches and panel discussions featuring entrepreneurs; Olympians; actors; models; North Korean refugee Yeonmi Park; and activists of all types, including Yara Shahidi, whom Burch called “the voice of her generation,” and a trio of young women barely in the double digits. The event was free to anyone who submitted examples of the ways in which they “support women and help others address stereotypes.” Twelve hundred people turned up, and Burch said the wait list was 2,000-people strong.
With the subject of ambition as the organizing principle—often ambition in women is seen as a negative, not a positive—popular talking points included the dangers of stereotyping, the necessity of integrating a social mission into any business plan, and, of course, the 2018 midterm elections. Congressmen Joe Kennedy and Kevin McCarthy were in the house, and Burch got a big laugh during their panel when she said, “I’m going to start with the one I always get: ‘Tell me what you’re wearing.’”
Author Margaret Atwood discussed the genesis of her 1985 dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (the second season of Hulu’s adaptation debuts tomorrow), but not before talking about her earliest days as an author and the types of queries she often got from male reporters: “Do men like you?” and “How do you find time to do the housework?” Decades later, Burch said she’s familiar with that line of questioning. Not long after she launched her company 14 years ago, a journalist asked her, “Are you ambitious?” Burch resisted answering. “My feeling was he wouldn’t have asked that question of a man,” she explained.
Backstage in the greenroom, Atwood posed for pictures with the designer and sat down briefly for a handful of questions from Vogue.
I know that when you were starting to write The Handmaid’s Tale you pulled headlines.
I pulled news pieces.
Yes, news pieces. At this moment in time you could be pulling headlines.
I could.
Do you?
I take note of them, but of course the people who are really pulling them right now are the writing-room people. Bruce Miller, who is the showrunner, and his team are weaving little threads in. He says, “We’re not the news.” But they’re not ignorant of events unfolding.
You’re a consulting producer on the show; what does that mean?
It means I talk with Bruce on the phone or sometimes in person. He went over all of the changes in season one, and he sends me all the scripts. I read them, I make notes, like that. But I have no veto.
How does that feel, to have written something that’s obviously very dear to you and watch it change before your eyes?
I worked in films quite a lot in the ’70s, so I know where the problems are. The problem with this one is: How do you show the feeling of being outwardly compliant, how do you play that against inner rage? That is why Elisabeth Moss is so good. It was a problem when shooting because of the hats, but they designed the hats specially to let in quite a bit of light, so you could get the camera and look at her face up close. She also said it was wonderful to work without makeup, because when you’re working with makeup you feel that there’s a layer between you and the camera.
You said recently that science fiction writers are often asked and looked to because they have a sense of what’s next.
Yeah, what would the plot be?
So what’s your sense right now? Where is the world going?
I’m at a loss. You read so much about it, and I think you’d have to be an idiot to second-guess what happens next, because we don’t yet know what the [Mueller] investigators have collected, what they’ve found, but we would assume that they would not be proceeding unless they had some reason to believe that something pretty funny had gone on. About the total world order I’m worried, because the United States, by its lack of leadership, is creating a power vacuum, and there are others that are quite happy to step into that, and I’m not sure that’s really what people ultimately will find agreeable.
When you were writing the book 30-ish years ago, it seems like you had some latent anxiety at least. What about now?
I’m worried. Some of my structure in the The Handmaid’s Tale was retrospective. It was written in the 20th century, a century of noteworthy dictatorships, autocracies, and totalitarianisms. Not only Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, and Pol Pot, but a number of lesser ones. And we’re still living with some of them today, notably North Korea. These are not pleasant for the people living in them. You keep thinking they’ll fall apart, from within, and sometimes they do. Sometimes they fall apart with the help from without.
Being an optimist, and having grown up under George Orwell, 1984 does not end with Winston Smith being about to be shot in the back of the head. It ends with an essay on Newspeak written in the past tense in standard English. So that tells us that that regime did not prevail. I like to think that these regimes will not prevail. The United States is very diverse, is used to expressing itself, is not easily ground down. We’ve already seen a lot of pushback, though not in the place I’d like to see it. I’d like to see the Republicans in Congress standing up for the rule of law, but maybe they don’t feel that they’re quite at that point yet, maybe they don’t feel that they’ve seen enough evidence of transgressions that have taken place. They’re going to have to decide if they’re living in a democracy or not.
Picking up on what you said about optimism, what would you say you’re ambitious about in 2018?
Me? People of my age, we’ve done the ambition [Atwood is 78]. I’m involved in a number of things I support, some of them having to do with women, some of them having to do with climate and environmental concerns, and some of them having to do with literary things more broadly qualified as freedom of expression. Those have been my things for years and they’re still my things. I’m writing a book, of course; I’m writing two books. I have not stopped writing, and I continue on. Writers don’t retire, they only get worse [laughs]. So if I feel I’m getting really worse, then I’ll stop.
