Has Tory Burch Become… Cool Again?

The Lyst Index – the ultimate litmus test of the fashion industry’s hottest houses and trending tidbits – had a rather curious hodgepodge in store for Q3 of 2023.

In first place was the Maison Margiela Tabi Mary Jane – the it-shoe courtesy of Tinder’s titillating tales of the Tabi Swiper. Miu Miu’s office siren-approved cardigan stood at a close second, while COS’ quilted nylon bag had replaced its ubiquitous utilitarian UNIQLO $20 counterpart in third place.

Other surprising (but not really) entrants included Birkenstock’s Arizona sandals and the New Balance 550s, fresh on the heels of a Taylor Swift sighting.

However, a pair of Tory Burch mules that had discreetly climbed the ranks to sixth place was a surprise. The same Tory Burch that, for the better part of fashion’s amnesic past, has been evocative of preppy tunics Laura Reilly of Magasin describes as having “this sort of vague Hamptons-y veneer” over them, somewhat unremarkable purses, and ballets flats emblazoned with that inescapable gold logo medallion that’d populated middle-American malls in the late-2000s.

And like the New York Times quipped disbelievingly last year, “That’s Tory Burch?” we’re just as astonished – is Tory Burch really back?

The Age of América

Say what you will of the state of NYFW, but 2024 has quite definitively been the year of our homegrown labels. The Alaïa show in New York, for one, was delayed by nearly an hour in waiting for Rihanna, Madonna was seen gracing the front row at Luar, The Row continued with its no-phone policy au Paris, and Ralph Lauren SS25 teased us non-one-percenter peasants with a sumptuous Hamptons getaway.

Then Thom Browne, Michael Kors, Anna Wintour, and Jill Biden all came down to a non-partisan voting awareness march for the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), and Vogue and Willy Chavarria finally restored democracy by adding an accent to his show’s name, América.

Yet, the unmistakable standout of the chaotic six days was when Jodie Turner-Smith, Mindy Kaling, Elizabeth Olsen, Michelle Williams, and flocks of other famous faces all rolled up to the Tory Burch show in various iterations of its Pierced Mule. It was a guaranteed smash hit, not entirely unlike Chloé’s viral wedge moment last season.

And it placed the brand squarely back on the map.

But then, had Tory Burch ever really left the zeitgeist? Right from that $6 vintage tunic that Ms. Burch had thrifted from a Paris flea market (and now has it framed in her office), the brand’s ready-to-wear reflected ease and community, perfect for high-flying women such as herself who lunch and attend charity galas.

And she’s remained at the periphery of celebrity dressing throughout, outfitting Prince at Coachella and Catherine Zeta-Jones at Glamour’s Women Of The Year Awards, only to return to the forefront with a vengeance this year atop the likes of Emily Ratajkowski, Phoebe Bridgers and Hailey Bieber.

That doesn’t mean, however, that getting here has been easy. For one, the label has had to sell millions and millions of flats. And throughout its highly successful run, Manhattanites only had one name on their lips: Reva.

For Reva and Reva (and Reva)

Like every other vaguely questionable trend from the mid-aughts (one word: skinny jeans. Okay, that’s two), ballet flats are now having their own resurgence.

Like our favorite PB-alum Amanda Mull muses: “You can run from the return of the ballet flat, but you can’t hide. And, depending on how much time your feet spent in the shoes the last time they were trendy, maybe you can’t run either.”

But amidst the candy-colored sheen of velour tinting our collective conscience whenever we hark back to the mid-aughts, the Reva was a breath of fresh hair, a relatively adaptable flat with Audrey Hepburn-esque charm that Liana Satenstein recalls as the corporate footwear of choice among the women of Women’s Wear Daily.

And christened after Burch’s mother, whose sense of style dominated their Philadelphia Main Line home (and much of her daughter’s aesthetic), the Reva (here’s that name game at play again) allowed the Tory label to percolate from the Upper East Side to the average American household.

Yet, with widespread renown comes the risk of saturation. And on the heels (or rather, the toes) of the Reva, Burch’s double-T monogram and quintessentially buttoned-up Ivy League elegance swiftly lost their preppy charm as they became readily obtainable at every backwater outlet of J. Crew and Target.

As Vogue notes, “In an impressively short time, Tory Burch has created a $3.5 billion lifestyle brand based on… herself.” She went on Oprah and globetrotting to Rajasthan, and the Tory Burch Foundation was supporting women entrepreneurs worldwide. Her brand, it appeared, was now less interesting than her.

The Un-Cheugification of Tory Burch

For years, as a result, Burch’s logo sandals were being squarely (if somewhat uncharitably) classified as cheugy. What is cheugy, you ask?

Coined by Gaby Rasson in 2013 and made viral by Hallie Cain on TikTok, cheugyness is an abstract concept that exists less on its own and more through things that channel cheug: looking basic, motivational messages in loopy cursive, Gucci logo belts, and trend pieces discussing what’s cheugy. Like The Cut decrees, “So far, much of the Cheugy Discourse is people just trying to suss out what is and isn’t cheugy. The rest appears to be millennials having an existential crisis.”

Now, Burch herself ascribes much of the process of her namesake’s un-cheugification to a little souvenir she brought from France – her husband, Pierre-Yves Roussel, former chairman and CEO of LVMH. “I had to marry him to get him to be CEO,” Burch pontificates, but it’s not untrue. Miss Ma’am Burch could finally focus on the creatives with her husband in charge of the business.

And creative it is! SS21, a collection dedicated to Burch’s Quaker schooling, comprised startlingly sensual clothing that was less suited to private school garden parties and more to cool city clubs. For Fall 2023, the unmissable monogram was sliced in half, the bags themselves dangling from their flaps with reckless abandon to immediately evoke a messy Miuccia Prada reference. And, of course, there’s the updated Reva, now dubbed the Claire, that’s on everybody’s feet all over again.

But the biggest hit was arguably SS23’s Pierced Mule, which shot the brand up the Lyst Index and immediately made it the de rigueur uniformer of a cool new look worlds apart from Burch’s previous aesthetic. A slight confusion on the NYT’s part is certainly not unnatural – it is a rather dramatic pivot, after all.

To our excitement (not to mention, purses account for 45% of Burch’s business), the Pierced motif was adapted to a handbag for SS25, where the Piercing charm can be swapped for gold, silver, or even wooden and resin options.

A no-logo logo? Aren’t we here for it!

But for all the talk of the Toryssiance that has everyone from Park Avenue to Dimes Square in a chokehold, Ms. Burch herself remains surprisingly reticent about the whole thing. “Well, if that happened, I don’t know about it,” she claims, despite her first CFDA womenswear designer of the year nom last year suggesting otherwise.

Perhaps it’s because she doesn’t wish to alienate her older clientele. Maybe she genuinely believes she never went anywhere. Or perhaps that’d simply be cheugy.