IT'S TORY TIME

Sometimes, it begins with the self. TORY BURCH tells Jacquie Ang how soul searching reshuffled the deck and wrote the next chapter in her brand story.

- Jacquie Ang

There's something about Tory Burch that has been getting double takes. Her deviations from her uptown New York aesthetic have not escaped fashion observers' attention. It's as though she's been injected with a boost of audacity, reinvigorating her eponymous brand founded in 2004 with a new morethan-meets-the-eye cool.

Exaggerated hips, satin dresses worn back-to-front and exposed lingerie with undone hooks and eyes defined the upcoming Autumn/Winter 23 collection. Things get intriguing in the accessories department too. Surrealist twists lend dimension and drama to shoes with a witty trompe l'oeil "toe ring" and quirky reversed heels. On the classic pointy pump, it resembles a "broken" stiletto heel. The construction was a feat of engineering, the shoe girl said.

Industrial-sleek safety pin earrings appear to pierce through the cartilage, while the bottom half of her signature twin "T" brand logo looks like it's broken and swinging loose. The subversive undercurrents once unimaginable from Burch endow an enigmatic edge to the preppy-classic-meetsbohemian-luxury so synonymous with her.

TAKE TWO

"I would say... we're just beginning," she laughed when asked about her recent game-changing outputs. "Having Pierre [-Yves Roussel, her husband] come on board four years ago was obviously the best thing for me personally and as a businessperson, because now, I see myself as 100 percent designer," she told Prestige in a one-on-one interview in her boutique at The Shoppes in Marina Bay Sands one early Monday morning.