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She’s gone from ballet flats to a billion-dollar listing, but Tory Burch isn’t stopping there...

It is 10.30pm on a cool Monday night in London and Tory Burch is going all in. In spite of her floor-length embroidered sheath, she’s dancing on a banquette at Mayfair’s normally buttoned-up restaurant Isabel, as Salt-N-Pepa perform ‘Push It’ in front of her.

Burch is in town to celebrate the launch of her Regent Street megastore, and tonight she has got her twin sons, Henry and Nick (from her second marriage, to entrepreneur Christopher Burch), along with her fiancé, Pierre-Yves Roussel (the handsome chairman and CEO of LVMH),

in tow. It is not long before the boys are lured on to the stage at Pepa’s request. Cue raucous cavorting to ‘Whatta Man’.

‘I’m the luckiest person to have found the love of my life,’ Burch gushes to the fashion crowd that includes her friend and super-stylist Elizabeth Saltzman, Diane Kruger, Gemma Arterton and Elizabeth Olsen.

Tory Burch - Regent Street
Tory Burch - Regent Street

More than just the hostess with the mostess, Burch is the billionaire businesswoman who has built a 200-store fashion empire from her Upper East Side kitchen table in just 13 years and shows no signs of slowing down.

A few months earlier, I visit America’s golden girl at her polished Midtown offices as she prepares for her AW17 show. It’s a Sunday afternoon, New York is slushy underfoot, with half the subway down and the rubbish piled to head height on the pavement. On approach, all I can think is that someone needs to make America great again, and as it turns out that could well be Tory Burch.

For the former fashion PR it all started at 38 with the logoed Reva ballet flat, originally retailing at $195 and named after her mother, who used to don a similar style in the Sixties. A year later Oprah Winfrey proclaimed Burch as fashion’s ‘next big thing’, resulting in eight million hits on her fledgling website the following day. ‘I wanted to design the most beautiful things we could, but I didn’t want it to cost a fortune,’ she says of her magic formula that has shaped a whole lifestyle proposition aimed at a consumer seeking luxury design at accessible prices. She has since been hailed by Forbes as the 73rd most powerful woman in the world.

In 2009 the 51-year-old started The Tory Burch Foundation Capital Program — something she had wanted to do from the get-go, even when being warned off using phrases such as ‘social responsibility’ and ‘building a business’ in the same sentence by most of the male investors she initially met. ‘That motivated me more: it was a stereotype that had to be gotten rid of,’ she says, now nestled on a plush couch in her office suite, which more closely resembles a lounge room thanks to its on-brand allocation of mounted blue china plates, rich upholstery and an abundance of silver-framed family photos.

‘I think millennials care about social issues,’ she continues, and she would know: her blended brood now includes nine children — three boys with Burch, his three daughters and Roussel’s three boys, all aged from 11 to 20. ‘Certainly, if we can inspire businesses earlier on to get involved in advocacy and philanthropy…’ She pauses. ‘I mean our foundation isn’t a charity; it’s about empowerment. We want to help women see their potential and embrace ambition.’

Tory Burch & Oprah Winfrey
Tory Burch & Oprah Winfrey

The foundation is in partnership with the Bank of America. In the past three years it has given more than 1,200 female American entrepreneurs access to almost $30m (£23m) in loans along with mentoring and what Burch calls a ‘mini business-school’ education programme. ‘It’s actually a wonderful story because it’s really about women helping women. One of my best friends from Penn [the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied art history] is how we have that partnership.’ That friend is Anne M Finucane, vice-chairman of the Bank of America. Together they have fuelled the fires of start-ups ranging from vegan chocolate company Bixby & Co to natural toothpaste brand Dr Brite, founded by breast cancer surgeon Paris Sabo. ‘The only commonality is that it’s women,’ she smiles, pushing her honey-blonde bob behind an ear to expose a diamanté earring that jazzes up her blouse, denim and boot combo.

Burch’s social stance aligns with her #EmbraceAmbition online campaign featuring supporters Julianne Moore, Melinda Gates and Anna Wintour. ‘Pay inequality is obscene,’ she continues. ‘To me this is not a favour. It should be a human right. It’s half of the population and it should be about the quality of work, not gender.’

Then there’s the gamut of boards on which Burch sits, from America’s Breast Cancer Research Foundation to the Council of Fashion Designers of America. ‘There is so much divisiveness right now,’ she adds of her country’s present political and social turmoil. ‘It’s time to come together and be accountable. Respect, civility, acceptance and inclusion are at the core of who we are and should be a given.’

Jessica Alba and Tory Burch (Getty Images for Tory Burch)
Jessica Alba and Tory Burch (Getty Images for Tory Burch)

We may just have a level-headed politician in the making, but in addition to her passion and social conviction, Burch is as warm as she is sincere. Yes, she lives in an ivory tower — her primary residence is atop The Pierre hotel overlooking Central Park, where she has recently converted three apartments into one for her family — but she credits much of her career success to being what she terms ‘scrappy’, or ‘not coming out with a big bang, paying your dues, learning about your customer and perfecting the product’.

In 2015 Burch moved into the leisurewear space with Tory Sport, which has a retro, Royal Tenenbaums vibe and is now stocked on Net-A-Porter and mytheresa.com. ‘Personally I love sports [she starts each day with 6am gym training] and the exciting thing about Sport is that the product is resonating.’ That said, ‘doing another start-up is insanely hard, but we want Tory Sport to have its own identity.’ Hers is a dual creative and business role. ‘It was all a bit of a learning curve,’ the chief creative officer/chairman/CEO smiles. ‘I wasn’t trained as a designer. I wasn’t trained as a CEO, so it’s been this incredible journey. I love the intersection of creative and business — that’s what is so inspiring.’

Tory Burch, Freida Pinto, and Emma Roberts (FilmMagic)
Tory Burch, Freida Pinto, and Emma Roberts (FilmMagic)

Burch’s first New York job after college was for her mum’s designer friend, the eccentric minimalist Zoran. ‘He looked like Rasputin and there were no desks. We had mats on the floor,’ she remembers. During this time Lauren Bacall and Jackie Kennedy Onassis would simply stop by. ‘It was this incredible introduction to fashion,’ she laughs of the multi-tasking assistant role. Her career ladder slowly became more corporate from there, starting with a job at Harper’s Bazaar and then in PR at Ralph Lauren and Vera Wang, followed by Loewe when Narciso Rodriguez was at the helm. It was after the birth of her third son, Sawyer, that Tory Burch LLC started to materialise. During trips back to Philadelphia to support her mother at a time when her father was not well (he passed away in 2007), she would delve into her closets, which held treasures from the Sixties and Seventies. ‘Easy pieces that are impossible to find, like a great trench coat or cigarette pants,’ she reflects. ‘I was like, “Okay, these are missing from the market”.

‘My greatest inspiration is my mom,’ she affirms. ‘She is my best friend, my greatest mentor and my role model. She is an eternal optimist who lives by the motto, “The glass is half full.”’

Kate Bosworth and Tory Burch (WireImage)
Kate Bosworth and Tory Burch (WireImage)

Reva Robinson (née Schapira) was a former actress who ran with the likes of Marlon Brando and Steve McQueen before the suave Ira Earl ‘Bud’ Robinson — who inherited a stock exchange seat and a paper cup company — threw his hat into the ring. While courting her mother, her father would take out ads in the local newspaper’s ‘Help Wanted’ section and sign it ‘Love Relentless’, which inspired Burch’s Love Relentlessly fragrance. ‘My dad married my mom when he was 43. He was quite the bachelor,’ she smiles. Earlier he had wooed Grace Kelly. ‘My father would be on a tractor looking so chic in his espadrilles, a perfectly pressed pink shirt and khakis… it was always attention to detail.’

Growing up in the bucolic setting of Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, her mother’s dinners were by all accounts just as immaculate: ‘She was an organic gardener in the Seventies.’ Burch may have been a longstanding doyenne of the uptown social whirl, but these days her happy place is her own Southampton vegetable garden. ‘In my 20s it was about going out and having fun, and now it’s just about my family and seeing close friends.’

Tory Burch and Constance Jablonski (Getty Images)
Tory Burch and Constance Jablonski (Getty Images)

Seeing Burch cuddling up to fiancé Roussel might make you think she is in one of the happiest periods of her life, but she has had her fair share of heartache. In 2006 she divorced Christopher Burch, who was still co-chair of her board when, in 2011, he set up the lifestyle brand C Wonder: a proposition that was deemed too close for comfort by Tory’s camp. A lawsuit ensued, eventually resulting in Christopher Burch selling a portion of his stake. Tory reportedly still owns the largest stake, and in spite of omnipresent rumours about going public, she confirms, ‘that’s not something that’s on my horizon any time soon. It’s a luxury to be private for as long as we can be. I would prefer to be profitable rather than enormous; I would just rather have a healthy company instead of being everywhere. And that’s what drives me in business.’

Tory Burch
Tory Burch

How does she feel about maintaining such a public persona? ‘I guess I am the face of the brand, but I never really look at it like that,’ she smiles. ‘Humility, now more than ever, is so important to me, and never being arrogant. I’m incredibly flattered when people choose to wear our clothes, so if I can be a role model for women to really believe in themselves and embrace ambition... I think the most important thing right now is women’s empowerment.’

She may be revered for having the perfect touch, but Burch makes a point of insisting that perfection isn’t her motivation: ‘Perfection is very uninteresting to me. That’s the last thing I see and certainly if people knew me better they would know that that’s just not what inspires me. I actually love imperfection. I love quirkiness, interesting facts, things that are high-low. It’s an interesting mix that inspires me.’

Does she care about things like her company’s unicorn status (aka its billion-dollar Forbes-list valuation)? ‘I’m honoured to be included, but it’s not something I think about. That’s a number on paper. My focus is on the work and continuing to grow our business,’ she maintains. And with that she’s off downstairs to help British stylist Tabitha Simmons (who also has her own shoe label) put the finishing touches to Burch’s 2017 Autumn/Winter collection.