Arriving to the former Domino Sugar Refinery on the Williamsburg waterfront in Brooklyn for Tory Burch’s spring 2025 show on Monday evening, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were at the Paris Olympic Aquatic Centre. The floor and walls of the glass domed penthouse had been transformed with trompe l’oeil painted tiles to look like the inside of a pool, and on the runway, there were sequined nylon swimsuits that would be perfect for an artistic swimmer. Or perhaps an artistic gymnast: 2024 Olympic all-around and uneven bars bronze medalist Suni Lee sat front row (alongside Michelle Williams, Jodie Turner-Smith, and Elizabeth Olsen) wearing a textured cotton minidress and fall 2024’s pierced pump.
Burch wasn’t thinking about the Olympics specifically. “I love sports—always have,” she said. She is, after all, an avid tennis player. And besides, the collection was designed months before Team USA made their way down the Seine on a barge. Burch was more interested in interrogating the relationship between performance activewear and sportswear. “It’s kind of one and the same in my mind right now,” she said. “I see young girls wearing a tennis dress on the street, and it’s really interesting to me because I love technical things that you can play in, but I think they’re probably not on the way to the court—they’re fuzzing the line.”
Fuzzing the line is a good way of summarizing the spring lineup, which was the first time Burch showed main line and Tory Sport together. She is doing away with the labels, so her signature side-slit tennis dresses and tech knit jacquard matching sets can be reintegrated into the Tory Burch world. On the runway, the sequined swimsuits were paired with velour and seersucker track pants with drawstring details for a dressed-up look that had the nonchalance of an athlete wearing warm-ups. Plain nylon swimsuits—like the kind that work better for winning races than performing synchronized routines—served as multifunctional layering pieces, worn as base layers under chenille jacquard coats and jersey chiffon dresses.
The whole collection was built for movement. Burch is well-versed in the legacy of American sportswear: she’s referenced Claire McCardell in past collections and wrote the forward to a re-edition of the sportswear pioneer’s 1956 style guide What Shall I Wear? At a time when women were still donning clothes that required corsets and petticoats to provide shape, McCardell’s wrap dresses achieved the same effect through a waist accented by a wrap belt, tied at the side. Here, a cotton jacquard wrap dress with double ties that revealed flashes of skin worn by Paloma Elsesser made that midcentury silhouette feel thoroughly of the moment.
