Whether she’s crafting a scent or a viral dress, the designer loves a challenge.
Welcome to Behind the Beauty, a recurring series spotlighting the power players driving the beauty world forward. In it, these leaders muse on every facet of their journey, from where they draw inspiration to the breakthrough advice that has transformed their careers.
The world of Tory Burch, best known for her eponymous line of classic American sportswear, which she founded in 2004, is ever-evolving, especially in the realm of fragrance. Since adding scent to her portfolio in 2013, the designer has built an olfactory universe as rich and eclectic as her clothes. And trust that with a dozen fragrances and counting, there is a scent for everyone.
“It’s about individuality,” Burch tells InStyle. ”The way I work on fragrance mirrors how I look at [fashion] design and work on a collection there. I like the idea of tension and contrast and re-imagining classics.”
Over the past decade, her biggest hits have included her eponymous eau de parfum—a blend of lush peony and tuberose mingling with crisp citrus notes grounded by earthy vetiver—and her ever-expanding Essence of Dreams collection, inspired by drifting off to sleep. The latter debuted in 2022 with five scents, including Sublime Rose, Electric Sky, and Cosmic Wood, and expanded earlier this year with another quintette exclusively using Middle Eastern ingredients and blends, like Burch’s personal favorite, Luminous Musk, a bright musk with a heart of jasmine and ylang ylang. Burch has also infused fragrance into body lotions and a trio of layering oils in three of her favorite scents (rose, vetiver, and sandalwood) to encourage different ways of exploring fragrance.
The latest fragrance in her trove? That would be the just-launched Sublime, a cool leathery blend layered with fresh rose, earthy vetiver, honey Osmanthus flower, and zesty mandarin. The genesis of its creation was an old leather bag passed down from her grandmother to her mother. “I wanted to create that unexpected tension of starting with leather and then adding different notes, like Osmanthus and light rose, where it twisted it in a way,” Burch explains.
The story of Sublime is furthered by its unique—sure to become unmistakable—bottle. The sculptural 3-D shape (“It reminds me of the Guggenheim,” Burch muses) nods to the artfulness of the scent’s creation, complete with a slightly off-kilter silver logo cap that reflects “where we are today,” says Burch, referencing the radical rebirth the brand has undergone in recent years. She has also designed a 4-piece Sublime capsule clothing collection featuring the signature Sublime Coral color, including an iteration of that viral hoop dress and the bikini Kendall Jenner is wearing in the fragrance campaign.
As Burch unveils her latest juice, she opens up to InStyle about her journey into fragrance, her process for crafting a new scent, and her top advice for anyone embarking on a new project of their own.
InStyle: What first ignited your passion for fragrance?
Tory Burch: It actually started quite early when I was a little girl. My mom had this pretty extraordinary vanity of fragrances in her bathroom, and I would spend hours mixing and spraying them. She would laugh because she would have to throw me in a bath before we even had dinner. But I’ve always loved scents. And also my father, too. One of my earliest memories is of his Vetiver by Guerlain. It was a fragrance I loved wearing, even as a little girl. I loved wearing men’s and women’s fragrances. So our family joked that I was always smelling, not necessarily like a rose, but like Vetiver or Paris or Chanel No.19—whatever was on my mom’s table. And so it just transports me. There was also a fragrance [that] I think no longer exists that she had called Grain de Folie, which I loved.
InStyle: Are you a signature scent or fragrance wardrobe kind of person?
TB: I don’t always stick to one fragrance. Depending on my mood, I like to change them up, but I generally return to my favorite few. I like mixing fragrances, too. I’ve always liked doing that.
InStyle: Do you view fragrance as an extension of personal style?
TB: I like the idea of how you make a woman feel powerful. So, it starts with a few things in my thought process and head. And then you distill it down to: What’s a note that resembles that?
InStyle: Do you ever use fragrance to get in the mood while designing?
TB: I don’t know if it is about getting me in the mood to design, but every morning, I love wearing a scent. Sometimes, when I forget to put it on, it just irritates me. After my dad died, I wore Vetiver, which gave me such a wonderful feeling about him. So, it was more about emotion. I do think fragrance is a lot about emotion.
InStyle: What inspired you to expand your brand into fragrance?
TB: Fragrance had always been on my mind as something to do, but I wanted to find [the right company] with expertise that would be incredibly additive. And I don’t think there’s anyone better than Shiseido as a partner. I truly value our partnership, the attention, the quality, the craftsmanship, and the details. And as someone who’s a bit of a perfectionist, to have a partner that understands that and also understands protecting our brand and really having an alignment there, it’s been critical. So, it’s always been my goal to have a fragrance collection. And I think that I’ve never been more proud of where we’re taking it.
InStyle: The link between emotion and fragrance is so strong. How does that factor into your creations?
TB: I grew up on a Pennsylvania farm, so it goes back to nostalgia for me. My mother has been an organic gardener since the 1970s, so I have spent a lot of time around different flowers and scents. With Sublime, I wanted it to be unexpected. I remember that feeling of thinking we were going to start working on this fragrance. I was in Antigua, and I had this old leather bag that was literally from my mother. It might’ve been from my grandmother, actually. And the smell was intoxicating. So that was a starting point, and that wasn’t a usual place to start for this fragrance that we wanted to appeal to many different kinds of women.
InStyle: What are the biggest challenges of bringing a fragrance to life?
TB: First of all, I love a challenge. A fragrance that represents you or your vision? I think that’s a tall order. As I mentioned, balancing the notes is just endless adjustments and instinct. You have to really trust your instinct. It’s a long process, and it’s not only the juice; it’s the design of every last detail. It’s the bottle. How do you do something striking, different, unique, and has a personality? So I think there are many challenges there, but it’s a pretty extraordinary challenge that we love to do.
InStyle: In your creative process, how do you find the right balance between being a perfectionist and letting go?
TB: It’s about never compromising and never giving up. That’s one thing I have; I have tenacity. It’s almost like the [ready-to-wear] collection. You could keep going on a collection endlessly and make changes and make it better and better. But at some point, you have to say, this is it. So, for me, it’s how do we really think about the full picture. And when I think about the storytelling, it is that. We spend a lot of time on the juice, the bottle, and the packaging, so it comes together in a way that makes it seem like a 360-degree idea.
InStyle: What are your top pieces of advice for other founders?
TB: Oh, God. I have a lot of advice after 20 years, which is actually still young as a company, but it’s just hard to believe it’s been 20 years! One of the things that my mother and father always would say to me is, "Negativity is noise." And I think that that’s a really important message: to listen to yourself and not get overwhelmed when there’s bound to be opinions or anything negative around you. So tune it out. The other is: Don’t let people put you into a box. People tend to do that; they label you as something. And I think it’s wonderful never to be afraid of change. Be the editor of your own life and reinvent yourself. And that’s something that if I can do it, anyone can do it.