Why Tory Burch is a Force of Fashion—and Feminism

When it comes to building a relevant brand in 2019, the common refrain is that it has to be about more than good product. Millennials are looking for brands whose values align with their own; they want to feel good about where they’re putting their money. It’s symptomatic of social media and the rise of digital-first brands, which are expected to connect with customers largely through their own content (and often in lieu of traditional advertising). Of course, you can’t create good content without a good story—and if it centers around hot topics like sustainability and activism, even better.

Plenty of brands are promoting those issues, some with varying degrees of honesty. But Tory Burch has never had to worry about being authentic; she’s been ahead of the curve since day one. For starters, her brand—now worth $2.5 billion—was born in 2004 with a mission to combine luxury with affordable prices. That’s the m.o. of practically every new company in 2019, but at the time, it was prophetic. Burch understood both what women wanted and where the industry was headed. A few years later, in 2009, she built the Tory Burch Foundation, a nonprofit that supports the empowerment of women entrepreneurs and advocates for gender equality. It’s important to note that this was before Instagram, before the days of viral social media campaigns, and before we had to be dubious about a brand’s “do good-ing” efforts. Burch’s vision was sincere; it wasn’t driven by the potential upside of becoming a “face” of feminism, though that’s precisely what so many women have come to think of her as.

As Burch’s profile and business grew, so did the Foundation. At present, it has provided over $50 million in loans to more than 2,500 female entrepreneurs (with a major recent investment from Bank of America). Burch hosts annual #EmbraceAmbition summits, where she speaks with influential women in a variety of fields, including celebrities like Yara Shahidi, but also Margaret Atwood and Lilly Ledbetter. The summits are livestreamed worldwide, so millions of women everywhere can tune in and get inspired, too. What keeps Burch going is in the name: ambition. In the August 2015 issue of Vogue, she recalled a previous interview with The New York Times: “I told the writer that the word ambitious bothered me. And a friend of mine called me up after that and said, ‘You should never shy away from that word.’ That got me thinking. Why would women reject the idea of ambition? Well, because it’s a word that’s often used negatively to describe women. But that’s a cruel double standard. So now I have no problem saying I’m ambitious.”

Ambitious indeed. Burch’s Spring 2020 show in September will put her well over 50 collections, and then there’s her second line, Tory Sport, which she launched in 2015. As Maya Singer reported last month, the “athleisure boom” may have started a few years before that in 2007, when Lululemon IPO’d, but Burch wasn’t just reacting to the market, nor was it really about leggings. As a lifelong athlete, she simply couldn’t find what she wanted to wear, and she saw a gaping hole in a market of black spandex, neon stripes, cut-outs, and ultra-tight compression. “I started to think, How do we make this stuff chic again?” she told Vogue at the time. “What a lot of sports brands miss is femininity, unless it’s a garish femininity in the form of exposed body parts and neon colors. I was thinking more The Royal Tenenbaums.” In short, she wanted workout clothes that felt a little preppy and a little ’70s, and she didn’t want them to look expressly like workout clothes. She uses the same technology as other athletic brands, but in ways that aren’t cheesy or obvious: Her windbreakers are 100 percent water-resistant, but feel like soft cotton and come in cute Liberty-esque floral prints.

Unlike the brands that preach intensity, vigor, and #NoDaysOff, Tory Sport speaks to every kind of woman: those who exercise every day, who prefer long walks to SoulCycle, who actually hate leggings and prefer in Tory Sport’s signature track pants, who travel constantly, who just need comfortable, livable, and stylish clothes to chase her kids around the house. In short, Tory Sport reads more like “lifestyle clothing” than “athletic gear,” and in that way, it might embody the definition “athleisure” more than any other brand.

Burch will no doubt discuss this, the Foundation, and her many other ambitions at Vogue’s Forces of Fashion conference in October. For young women with fashion or business ambitions of their own, it will be a can’t-miss panel; mark your calendars for October 10th and 11th, and until then, revisit some of her best photos in Vogue.

Tory Burch is a speaker at Vogue’s 2019 Forces of Fashion conference, taking place October 10th and October 11th in New York City. Learn more and buy tickets here.