Philadelphia Style Magazine

Tory Burch Takes Her Brand to Beauty Counters

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Angelique blouse in tamarind ($295) and chain and stone bead rosary necklace ($245), Tory Burch. King of Prussia Mall, 610-337-2565; Pants, shoes, bracelets, and ring, Burch’s own.

What would Tracy Samantha Lord Haven—heroine of The Philadelphia Story—choose to wear for getting her groove on at American Bandstand in the 1970s? The undeniable answer is Tory Burch—and it would have made her the most fabulous gal on the floor. I summon this trigenerational fantasy confluence of Philly-based icons as no accident, but as an affirmation that the first two helped give rise to the third. Really, how lucky are you, Philadelphia: classic film, music, and fashion, all from your corner of the world, and all for the ages.

First, Burch describes what to her mind distinguishes Philadelphia style and fashion: “Women there love clothing that’s not so complicated. They want to be fashionable, but they are also very active, doing a lot with their kids, so they want to be comfortable. When I go there for the weekend [Burch’s mother recently moved to Haverford], I love our clothes because it’s so easy to just throw something on and put things together—casual chic.”

OK, we all know that Burch has been a New York girl for many years now and long a fixture of Big Apple society, but in any discussion about her beginnings, she is the first to hearken back to her roots in Valley Forge and at The Agnes Irwin School, which my friend Lisa Birnbach declared more than 30 years ago was one of the preppiest schools in America. This is by no means a bad thing; quite the opposite, when you look at the gorgeous and beloved output that has been created under Burch’s watch, and what she endeavors to do for empowering women. And she is scarcely 45. I could cite the staggering numbers concerning her business, which started a mere seven years ago and has grown into a half-billion-dollar enterprise with more than 60 stores worldwide, but that, however impressive, is not the point.


	Reena blouse in ecru ($250) and Tribley pant in Amethyst Durlez print ($250), Tory Burch. King of Prussia Mall, 610-337-2565; Bracelets and ring, Burch’s own Makeup by Berta Camal Hair by Jessica James

From Fashion to Fragrance
The point is her passion, and the work that goes into all of it—the shoes, the bags, the ballet flats, the dresses, everything else, all delightfully stunning, beautifully produced, yet not prohibitively expensive. Along with the expansion of Burch’s core brand with its new Manhattan flagship store and recently opened boutiques in Hawaii and Beirut, this year sees her first foray into the beauty business with a fragrance in development with Estée Lauder that will launch in 2013. “We are extremely excited and proud to be working with Tory Burch to develop her fragrance collection,” says Veronique Gabai-Pinsky, global president of Aramis and Designer Fragrances at Estée Lauder. “Tory’s eye for creativity, interest in culture, and keen business skills make her the perfect partner for the Estée Lauder Companies. She has a strong community of women sharing the same philanthropic values who love to be close to the brand and the social responsibility it represents.”

That idea of a community of women has become the center of the Tory Burch brand and led to the launch of the Tory Burch Foundation in 2009. By partnering with ACCION USA, a leading US microfinancing lender, the foundation has provided micro loans to women in need who want to start small businesses and otherwise cannot get financing. The foundation further sweetens the pot by offering a mentoring program so that the educational as well as financial needs of these entrepreneurs are met.

Speaking of this, all proceeds from the sale of her recent collaboration with street artist James De La Vega go to the foundation, and the results are stunning. The bags, wallets, and iPad cases are a riot of expressive color and jottings that contrast brilliantly with the vessels’ expert craftsmanship. It’s as if Burch and De La Vega took a white leather tote and passed it back and forth, taking turns covering it with vibrant doodles and exchanging messages of encouragement: if the cup isn’t full... add water; be mindful even if your mind is full; you are your best investment.

Amusingly, when Burch first encountered De La Vega’s work (walking past his storefront on St. Mark’s Place in New York’s East Village), she introduced herself, gave him her card, and said she was amazed by his message and would be interested in collaborating on something. His response: “Absolutely not.” She laughs as she recalls, “So I said, ‘OK, well, it was really nice meeting you.’ And I bought a few stickers for my boys’ rooms and left.” A year later, he called her back, impressed with her foundation and her work in general.

When presented with this opportunity to sit down with the woman herself, as a graphic designer, I first had to ask her about the logo. It’s kind of fascinating, because as ubiquitous as it is in her oeuvre, it’s also discreet in its own way—just abstract enough not to make her customers look like billboards for her brand, but distinct enough to be unmistakable. Where did it come from?

“Modco,” she says, referring to the downtown branding firm that counts among its other clients Vera Wang and the estate of Diana Vreeland. “They showed me over 200 ideas, but I knew which was the right one immediately. I’m also a huge fan of David Hicks [the British Midcentury Modern interior designer], and there’s a nod to him in it, too.” Indeed, Hicks’s mark is four severe H’s joined to make a sort of X; but Tory’s two T’s that make a plus-shaped cross have a touch of baroque styling all their own.

Before I get a chance to delve into her upbringing on a Valley Forge horse farm, she tells me about a trip to Myanmar from which she has just returned, the highlight being a dinner with none other than Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese dissident activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 and was released from decades of house arrest only in late 2010—sort of the Nelson Mandela of Burma. “I think she’s going to run for office—after 20 years of house arrest! Incredible,” exclaims Burch.

Burch's Style DNA
So, let’s talk about clothes. I ask Burch to tell me one lesson that she learned about fashion from her mother. The answer doesn’t disappoint. “The clothes should never wear you; that was something she always told me. Learn what looks good on you and your body, for your age, to feel confident. Don’t follow trends too closely.”


	Pennie jacket in storm blue ($275) and Samona top in blue dot ($250), Tory Burch. King of Prussia Mall, 610-337-2565; Ring, Burch’s own

Her reflection on the same topic concerning her father is a bit more involved. “I always thought he should have been a designer, he had such impeccable style. He was known among his peers as one of the first men to wear Gucci loafers in Philadelphia. That was considered very odd, but appreciated. He also loved his John Lobb shoes; he had the same pair for 40 years. I hung on his every word about clothes, but we disagreed about chunky heels—he didn’t like them, and I did. He preferred a more refined shoe on women, something sexier.”

Burch and her brothers have kept much of their beloved dad’s wardrobe, most of which was custom-made in Europe, New York, and, yes, Philadelphia. “The detailing is just exquisite, unique, different. His trademark was he used to have his jackets lined with Hermès scarves.” She plans to eventually use it as reference for a Tory Burch men’s line, but that will come down the road. When she does decide to commit to it, she plans to start with gifts and accessories and build from there. “We do have some swim trunks in the works, actually.”

Burch then tells me about the heirloom that is nearest to her heart (literally): “A pendant my father had made for his mother; it’s engraved je t’aime—un peu, beaucoup, passionnément, à la folie. Which loosely translates as, ‘I love you a little, a lot, like crazy.’ It wraps around a sunflower ornament. I wear it often, and it’s become the logo for our foundation.”

The question that most fascinates me when it comes to designers is who they pay attention to, and Burch, as a lover of fashion, is not shy with her answer. “Well, I’m always looking, but the first collection I probably look for now is Céline,” she says. “And I always love Proenza Schouler, and what Olivier Theyskens did for Rochas.” She thinks some more. “Balenciaga. Prada.”

She has just started doing runway shows (her second was on February 14), which she likens to “getting married twice a year.” “It’s this huge shooting plan, and we work a year in advance and it’s a tremendous amount of work, and then it’s over in nine minutes,” she says. “And then you wait for the reviews.”

Next we delve into the creative process, and just how much of the line she creates or at least oversees. “I oversee everything,” she says. “We have a great design team. I give them direction, talk about colors and fabrics, we do that all together; then we talk about shapes and silhouettes, and they come back and present things, and then we edit. Then things get sent to Asia, where our production is, and the samples come back, and we fit the samples. So it’s really a collaborative process... and that’s just ready-to-wear. Then we have handbags, footwear, costume jewelry, and it goes on and on. Eyewear. We ship new product to stores 11 times a year.” She doesn’t sound at all exhausted by this.

Or anything else, for that matter. She exudes pure calm that never spills over into arrogance (“My father was very calm. I got that from him”), and she has a great vibe with her coworkers—I could sense it in the time we spent together. You cannot fake that.

You also cannot fake knowing so much about visual culture, both in and outside of the fashion world. When she asks where I am from and I tell her Reading, she tells me of an artist named Jack Savitsky, also from the area, a folk painter of coal miners who died in the early 1990s. I’m not familiar with him, but sure enough, his work is fascinating.

“I have so many things that I want to do,” Burch confesses when I ask about the future, but she then hesitates. “No, I mean ‘we.’ So many things we want to do... and I feel like we’re just beginning.” Tracy Lord would approve.

"The Hiker Mom" Who Never Lost Hope

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Laura Fattal at home with a photo of Josh and Shane stepping off an Omani Royal Air Force plane in Muscat, Oman, after they were released on bail

On September 21, 2011, Philadelphia native Josh Fattal and his friend and cellmate, Shane Bauer, leaped from a private jet and into the embrace of their families on an Omani runway after 26 months of captivity in an Iranian prison. President Obama celebrated their freedom: “I welcome the release of Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal from detention in Iran and am very pleased that they are being reunited with their loved ones,” he declared. “The tireless advocacy of their families over these two years has won my admiration and is now coming to an end with Josh and Shane back in their arms. All Americans join their families and friends in celebrating their long-awaited return home.”

Unbeknownst to Laura Fattal, she and her son Josh began that fateful day of July 31, 2009, on a strikingly similar note, despite being half a world away from one another. Josh was with Bauer and friend Sarah Shourd hiking in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, where they had entered from Turkey three days earlier. At home in Elkins Park, Laura had plans to meet a friend for a hike at the Schuylkill Center in nearby Roxborough. “We went to tea afterward in Manayunk, and after about 45 minutes I said, ‘I really have to go home now.’ There was no real reason, the kids were away and my husband was working, but something was calling me. I had an intuition that I had to go home, and I was right.” On the family’s voicemail was chilling confirmation of a mother’s instinct from the United States Embassy in Baghdad. “I called and discovered that the Iranian government was holding my son Josh and his friends in custody.” Laura’s life changed in an instant.

“When I got the phone call from Baghdad—and I don’t frequently get calls from Baghdad,” she laughed, “they said, ‘Would you like to talk to the other mothers?’ and all three of us in separate conversations with the US State Department officials said yes. They put Cindy (Shane’s mother), Nora (Sarah’s mother), and me together the same day.” The relationship between these mothers would grow to sustain them and their families through the tumultuous journey they were about to take together. “The ‘hiker families,’ as we became known, were always united. We had a single focus: to gain the release of our children from an unjust detention.”

Through a stroke of odd luck, Laura had recently finished a one-year position as an instructor at Temple University and was considering her options for the fall term that July. “My PhD is in curriculum and instruction with a specialty in art education, and I have worked professionally in this field for 25 years. When this crisis hit I had a new job: I became the mother of the hiker, and my job was getting my younger son home.” Her older son, Alex, was working toward a PhD in anthropology at Harvard and doing research in Sweden in the summer of 2009. He dropped his doctoral work and returned home to join his mother in securing Josh’s freedom.


	Laura Fattal, Cindy Hickey, and Nora Shourd protesting outside Iran’s mission in New York

In this new role Laura would start her day checking Iranian websites and news agencies such as Press TV and the Tehran Times and then looking at international news about Josh, Sarah, and Shane from Google alerts. Three times a week Laura and the hiker families would have conference calls with the State Department, and then there were endless phone calls between family members throughout the week. “We all decided after two and a half months of Josh, Shane, and Sarah’s detention to enlist the support of numerous foreign embassies in Washington. This required multiple trips to the capital to meet with diplomats. One of the first embassies we went to was the Sultanate of Oman, which turned out to be the pivotal country in securing the release of our kids.” Laura explains, “The Swiss embassy has the official role of being the protecting power of the US in Iran, so we were in frequent contact with them. Asking for humanitarian help from foreign countries is not an unusual thing to do. Countries help each other all the time. Diplomats would give us great hope and reassurance throughout the next 26 months. I had a Rolodex with 60 embassies’ addresses and contacts.”

Laura learned quickly how to navigate the worlds of diplomacy and the media to get and keep her cause in the spotlight. “I took a very proactive stance along with Cindy and Nora to not only speak with foreign embassies, ecumenical leaders, and organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, but to reach out to international media. The campaign brought me in front of ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, as well as Oprah. I was regularly on local radio stations, and Michael Matza at The Philadelphia Inquirer and Pat Ciarrocchi at KYW kept Josh’s story in the forefront of our local news.” The women also began their website, freethehikers.org, in August 2009, and Laura became savvy using social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook to spread the word of all political developments.

The captives were held at Evin Prison, a notorious political detention center in the northwest section of Tehran. At a press conference a few days after his 2011 release, Josh told reporters, “Many times—too many times—we heard the screams of other prisoners being beaten, and there was nothing we could do to help them.” The families lived in fear of their children being maltreated or tortured. Laura, Cindy, and Nora applied for visas to Iran in January 2010, and with the help of the Swiss government they were granted entrance that May. Laura remembers, “When we arrived in Tehran we were met by Livia Leu Agosti, the Swiss ambassador to Iran who was a great support to us during our stay.” The mothers and their children were reunited for two days at the Esteghlal International Hotel. The trip helped to humanize the Americans to everyday Iranians. “Women came up to Cindy, Nora, and me in the North Tehran Market and said, ‘We want the best for your children. We are sorry your children are in prison and we feel very bad for you. Inshallah, God willing, things will work out.’ The Iranian people are a good people being ruled by a government that is very suspicious of anything American. This is the problem.”

On September 14, Sarah was released from Iranian custody on humanitarian grounds—though it was widely reported in the press that it was due to her declining health—but not before $500,000 bail was secured. At the time of Sarah’s release all three were charged with illegal entry into Iran and espionage. In mid-September tensions arose between Iran’s President Ahmadinejad, who had made a vow to release the young men before his attendance at the United Nations General Assembly in New York the following week, and the Iranian judiciary, who rejected this.

For the families it was another excruciating wait as the trial date was pushed from November 6, 2010, to February 6, 2011, and then to May 11, 2011. When on May 11 Josh and Shane did not appear in court for their trial, Laura decided it was time to take action in the form of rolling hunger strikes. “Cindy and I started the hunger strike because Josh and Shane’s trial was postponed from May 11. A follow-up trial should take a day. The Iranians postponed it for another three months.” The hunger strikes were adopted by each of the hikers, their families, Iranian American groups, former Colombian hostage Ingrid Betancourt, and peace activists Cindy Sheehan and Ela Gandhi.


	Laura Fattal with her son at their first meeting since his arrest.

The trial finally did resume on July 31, and on August 20, 2011, Josh and Shane were convicted of illegal entry into Iran and espionage and were sentenced to eight years in prison. Then in September a sudden reversal occurred and word was sent via Oman that the prisoners would be released, with the Iranian government demanding $1 million bail. “We were told to come to Oman a week before they were released, but then there was an unexpected delay, so we were in Oman for eight days.” Finally, on September 21, 2011, Josh and Shane were released and arrived in Oman to the delight of their families and friends. “On our website the sound effects on the reunion video were mine. I was shouting, ‘Whoo, whoo, whoo!’ ” says Laura.

Laura Fattal’s job as “the hiker mom” is over, and last fall she accepted a full-time position teaching arts education at William Patterson University in New Jersey. “I am thrilled to have returned to my work. I am bringing my students to the new Islamic galleries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. I hope that seeing artifacts of other countries and understanding civilizations can help to bridge political and cultural misconceptions.”

This January Josh gave a toast at the 70th birthday celebration of Muhammad Ali (who, as a humanitarian and a Muslim, was diligent in the struggle for his release). Laura recalls what Josh said about that special occasion: “It didn’t matter whether I was Jewish or Christian or Muslim. To him, I was a human being and human beings deserve justice. That is an inspiration to all of us and an urgent message to the world.” The three hikers and their families continue to speak out concerning the plight of their Iranian lawyer, Masoud Shafiei, who has been denied the right to travel abroad by Iranian authorities in the wake of his defense of the Americans. Josh recently settled in Oakland, California, to be near Sarah and Shane as the three begin writing their collective memoir and prepare for Sarah and Shane’s wedding this May. Josh is serving as best man.

A Sartorial Staycation in Philadelphia

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Style News: TOMS Launches a Line of Ballet Flats

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 10:44:00 -0500

TOMS ballet flats

The exceedingly comfortable TOMS slip-ons have been morphed into a collection of ballet flats ($74–$84) for spring. Available in 13 colors and styles, materials include suede animal print, black leather, canvas, burlap, linen, and a woven variety. For fans of the classic TOMS shoe, there is also a limited-edition Valentine’s Day print (gray canvas, pink hearts) available only online. And, as always, for every TOMS shoe purchased, the brand will donate a pair of shoes to a person in need. Nordstrom, 7239 S.W. 88th St., 786-709-4100