Tory Burch talks women and ambition ahead of Hong Kong pop-up for her new label Tory Sport
Fashion designer’s new athleisure label to appear in Lee Gardens this summer, while her foundation’s Embrace Ambition campaign is pushing the message that women need to be loud and proud about their dreams
Tory Burch is a self-made billionaire in a world where there are still more CEOs called John on the FTSE 100 than female CEOs. She has built an accessible luxury empire from her kitchen table and has created a new model of high-low fashion retail that has spawned hundreds of copycats.
But Burch hasn’t always celebrated her extraordinary success. In fact, over the years she has found herself shying away from a word that is obviously applicable to her: ambition.
“I remember reading a New York Times article that described me as ambitious and I didn’t like it,” she says. “I wanted to be feminine, and I knew that word threatened people’s perception of me. And then I realised that if I felt it, how many other women did too? And after hundreds of conversations with people all over the world, I began to see exactly how harmful this double standard was – the idea that in men, ambition is attractive, but in women it’s something to suppress or be ashamed of.”
We are having coffee at Claridge’s on an unseasonably hot spring day in London and I am finding it difficult to imagine Burch being ashamed of anything. Dressed in the oversized floral prints and chic ballet flats that her brand is famous for, she is in the British capital for the launch of her new Regent Street store. She is confident, articulate, beautiful and ageless in a way that only the famous seem capable of.
But despite the high society gloss, she is also warm and engaging, apologising profusely for being 10 minutes late and questioning me repeatedly on how, as a single woman, I feel about the word “ambition”.