The soundtrack from The Shining played as guests entered Tory Burch’s Sunken Garden by Isamu Noguchi showspace tonight. The music was a red herring. “I like a little humor,” Burch said with a laugh. In fact she was focused on joy and optimism this season. “I was thinking about how people need to escape and heal something,” she said. “So I started with the concept of opulent femininity, always with the tension of the utilitarian and that contrast of sportswear.”
Women painted hosiery seams on the back of their legs during World War II, when silk and nylon were rationed for military use. We’re not experiencing anything like that level of austerity, obviously, yet Burch is right that many women are looking for tempting diversions of a material kind.
She picked up where last season left off, circling around a sort of mid-century glamour: dressed up, embellished, and accessorized, only here also modulated with a quirky irreverence. The bead embroidered granny cardigans had obvious antecedents on her recent runway, but these were shrunken with rumpled plackets as if they’d been mis-buttoned. Look closely and you’ll see the models’ multi-strand beaded necklaces were threaded with oversize shark’s teeth.
Backstage Burch pointed out other off-kilter details: a coat dress with a tilt to its hem and draped dresses engineered to look like they were coming undone, as if they’d been pulled from deep inside a closet or the backroom of a vintage shop. Pantsuits played it straighter, but their 1940s broad shoulders and high-waisted trousers made them look distinctive.
The tailoring aside, what stood out in this collection was just how worked its surfaces were: the tie-dyed dress studded with clusters of crystals; the hand-painted silk “feathers” decorating an evening jacket and the boas that accompanied many of the looks; the deep pile of a striped chenille used for a caftan.
On the accessories front, bags emphasized the utilitarian side of Burch’s equation. The new Lee Radziwill shopper looks not unlike a paper bag; it would fit a substantial desk lunch. The shoes, meanwhile, were where Burch let her fashion freak flag fly. Of particular note were kitten heel pumps whose asymmetrical vamps were pavéd in microbeads.
