Fashion’s gone vanilla. I stopped counting the shows that opened with an all-white look somewhere around the 12th this week. The instinct to simplify, to clean up the mess of the current moment, our contemporary #trashland as I’ve heard it called, with serene understated clothes is understandable, but Tory Burch didn’t get the memo. Instead, she said, she opted for color and quirk.
That we were in a bank completed in 1929, not long before the “Black Tuesday” that precipitated the Great Depression, is perhaps not an allusion that team Burch wished to highlight, but Burch herself acknowledged the feeling of being on the brink. “I wanted to have some joy and optimism in this collection, just based on everything that’s happening in the world,” she said.
As a designer, you could play it safe, as many seem to be doing this season, or you could mix it up. Burch has been pursuing the latter path more or less since the pandemic, seeming to have resolved to put the preppy part of her brand behind it, as The Times of London recently said, in favor of something edgier.
Edgy isn’t exactly the right word for the clothes we saw tonight. Call them interesting instead, and worthy of close attention. Burch devoted a lot of energy to the small details of her clothes, be it the origami-ish collars of the knit polos, the stand-up lapels of jackets with a pair of slits for a pendant necklace to pass through, or the “mending” of ribbed sweaters achieved with seed bead embellishments. A nice touch that you can’t see in these pictures is the back vents in the hems of the jackets; a pull of a zipper can change the jacket’s shape.
Balloon pants, a silhouette straight out of the 1980s, have been trending this week. Once again, Burch had another idea: low-rise trousers in a 1990s vein. She started making her way in fashion in the ’90s, so there’s a full-circle logic to their return on her runway. Ditto the skirts, both pencil-slim and fuller, that hitched up higher on one hip than the other with the help of a sturdy belt.The embroidery sampler sweater, which features the initials of the studio team, will be popular, and may even inspire some at-home DIY stitching. With her flair for embellishment, you get the sense that Burch would approve of such a development.
