Campside media.
Okay, so you spend a lot of time by now listening to my disembodied voice.
But this voice is actually located in an office in Manhattan's Soho neighborhood.
Now, you may or may not know this, but this is the city's high-end shopping district.
There used to be a lot of artists around here living in lofts, and now there's a lot of Chanel.
Our podcast office is on the fourth floor, and in it, I have this teeny tiny window
that looks out on the backside of a boutique.
Once upon a time, something very strange happened to that boutique, particularly in 2011, as it was
opening. That day, a slight woman with a furrowed brow stood at its door. Her name is Tori Birch,
and she is the most successful female fashion designer in America today.
And she had heard that this store looked a lot like her own stores.
Tori pulls on the handle of a green lacquer door and enters, perhaps she sees, a big stack of sweaters.
There's green velvet curtains, gold trim, little nesting stools, gold logos on everything, and lots
of velvet. To be honest, this whole place sort of looks like Emilio Pucci vomited in Louis the
16th Versailles, and then turned it into the gap. I'm sorry to be bitchy, but this is a story about
fashion, and you're almost obligated to be bitchy. Okay, so there Tori is in the store.
But there is something deeply awry. Tori looks around, and perhaps she thinks,
oh my god, this is both my store and not my store. Her head begins to spin. It's almost like she's
in an actor's nightmare, you know, going out on stage and then everybody's seeing you naked.
For a fashion designer, the nightmare is putting out a hit fashion line and then being copied.
So who had done this to Tori? Was it a mean devilwares product ask rival?
Well, just wait until you hear what happened, and how this case of fashion copycat turned into
a strange battle of revenge.
From campsite media and Sony Music Entertainment, this is Infamous. I'm Vanessa Gregorriatus.
I'm Gabe Sherman, and this is part one of a three-part series, Retail Revenge.
So Vanessa, who is Tori Birch?
So she's a fashion designer, one of the biggest designers of the 21st century.
She's probably the biggest female fashion designer in Gen X, right, or millennials or anything like
that. Like, I mean, most of the other big female fashion designers are like Donna Karen,
Donna Tullerforsace. I mean, these people are ancient now. So Tori and Chris Birch didn't
talk for this podcast, but they did give a statement, and I'm going to read that later on.
So Vanessa, I live in New York. I see Tori Birch stores around New York. I have friends who buy
their clothes. I remember reading in the tabloids. She dated Lance Armstrong, if I'm correct.
That's correct. But why should I care beyond the tabloid headlines about Tori Birch?
Other than dating Lance Armstrong, I mean, that in itself is fascinating.
I mean, look, this isn't really a fashion story. It's much more a revenge story.
And I think I've read a lot of your writing, and you seem to like stories about revenge.
Well, I mean, it's Shakespearean, right? It's one of the primal motivations. We like to think
that people are driven by their better angels, but human nature is what it is. People want to
fucking get back at people. So it's a great engine for a story.
Yeah, agreed. Okay, so let's start off by talking about what Tori Birch is all about.
Her clothes have always exuded East Coast old money. They're tunics, tennis skirts,
tidy cardigans that are just perfect for throwing over a neat tailored dress.
When you summer as a verb, this is your wardrobe. And now Tori Birch, LLC, is also an extension
of Tori Birch, the person. I wanted to look through a luxury lens, but actually surprise
our customer with what we were able to give them. Just beautifully made things.
The way she talks is so interesting to me. It's Valley Girl by Way of the Mayflower.
She slender wears her blonde hair in a page boy haircut. Just very wash and go.
One thing my mother said to me is emotion gets you nowhere. She's absolutely right.
Now fashion is a snotty business, right? The double snaps, the one liners. Like Naomi Campbell
famously saying, you better check your lipstick before you come and talk to me.
Or Coco Chanel advising women to dress like you're going to meet your worst enemy.
On the other hand, the New York Times once called Tori, and I'm quoting, perfectly perfect.
What kind of woman gets described that way? A kind of woman who is pretty, not sexy,
who is practical and pragmatic, who is maybe a little basic, but super high-end basic.
She's not rebellious, but she's also not pumpkin spice latte. She's makiado with a dollop of foam.
She's a sporty preppy wasp and never mind that she's half-Jewish.
Her upbringing intrigued a lot of people who came an hour later. You know,
was she in fact the daughter of very wealthy people? Or alternatively, did this woman really
live in a simple country home? What was it with Tori Birch? Who really was she?
That's Michael Shenaerson. He's an author and a Vanity Fair contributing editor for 30 years.
Michael did the first meaningful story on Tori Birch. In 2007, he went to the house where she grew up.
Tori had grown up in a kind of rural stretch of the mainline in Philadelphia.
That's the geographic marker for the city's upper class.
It's a train line, a series of stops that were quite large homes that got a little smaller as
the train kept going further and further away from Philadelphia. We drove in a car together,
someone drove us, I should say, and that itself was kind of gutsy of Tori. I mean,
it was a good 90 minutes. We were sitting in a car, she was sort of at my mercy.
The pair chatted as they were chauffeured through New Jersey into Pennsylvania,
and gradually the houses became fewer and further between. They turned up a long driveway,
greenery on both sides, and pulled up to a large white Georgian home. Of course, it had pillars.
Her house is really kind of a right in between country house. It was a good size, certainly not
a mansion. That's not to say that Tori wasn't well to do. There were, as I recall,
two in staff, as they say. It was almost out of the antebellum south.
When Michael got inside, he was greeted by Tori's mother, Reeva.
She had dark, short hair, a very charming manner about her. She was wearing a pair of little flat
shoes that had the distinctive double T Tori birch logo on them. There I was chatting away with
the namesake of the soon-to-be-famous Reeva flats. So anyway, she gave me a little tour.
Every year, Reeva and her husband would board a cruise destined for Europe,
and they would travel for six weeks. So the house was filled with exotic objects from their travels.
Every year, they came back with a bunch of clothes that Reeva had bought in all ports of Europe.
So she led me up the stairs to the attic and opened the door. There were all these
racks of clothes all under plastic sheathing. I mean, there were literally hundreds of dresses
there. The clothes exuded a certain silver screen elegance. Simple, luxurious, and clearly expensive.
They looked like they could be worn by Audrey Hepburn or Grace Kelly.
These designs that were wrapped in plastic were mined for inspiration by Adel Tori.
But as a kid, she wasn't even interested. I don't think I had to dress on until my senior prom.
Instead of dressing up in her mother's pearls, she spent her days outdoors on her family's
30-acre estate. She was a tomboy. She loved sports. I grew up with three brothers. I
was playing tennis and lived basically outside in a tree. She told me there was a swing tied to
one of the big old trees on the property, and she spent just hours and hours on that tree swing.
She was perfectly happy to be alone. Not that she often was. By all accounts,
Tori was very popular. She went to a fancy prep school. She was captain of the varsity tennis team.
And when she graduated, she went to an Ivy League college, the University of Pennsylvania.
She was in the same sorority I was in. That's Justine Harmon, who profiled Tori for glamour,
and also pledged Kappa Alpha Theta at U Penn years earlier. She wasn't there at the same time as Tori,
but Tori's reputation had stuck around. I was only in it for a year and a half. Wasn't my scene.
It was very much Tori's scene. She would wear something and then six girls would be wearing it
the next night at a sorority party. Tori had a style that friends referred to as Tori Wear,
half preppy, half jock, or what they dubbed, proc. She was cool. She was very firmly grounded in
where she came from. She clearly knew exactly what she thought was cool, and that conviction
was palpable. But being cool would not be enough to combat an alleged billion-dollar copycat of
her business. For that, she would need that steely wasp resolve and a little bit of fashion
bitchiness. More after the break. You're listening to infamous from campsite media.
So, Tori Burch, the wasp from the main line, was a very cool girl, and it was no surprise that
she started working in New York fashion when she graduated college. In the 90s, that's what cool
girls did. As one of her first gigs, she got a job with a minimalist fashion revolutionary.
Here's Tori talking about him much later. Zorin was this incredible designer and eccentric known
for his minimalism. And my mom wore his clothing. So she made the introduction and I called him and
he said you could have a job if you start in a week. And so I graduated from college and then
a week later I was living in New York City. Next, she got another very silly job. She was writing
the tags, perhaps on cashmere sweaters, for Ralph Lauren. She was crafting meticulous sentences,
I'd imagine, about weight and heft and how very, very soft they were. So she was trying on a lot
of sweaters. And she was also trying on a lot of different men. But she was on the market when
she started to work at Vera Wang. She'd taken a job there doing publicity. Wedding dress day.
Vera Wang, America's favorite wedding dress designer. Here, she met a special someone who had
offices in the same building, Chris Birch. Chris was a businessman with charismatic whimsy.
He considered himself a visionary. It comes out of when you're a little boy and you come home
and it's the end of the year and the cherries are on the trees.
And you're thinking about you have a full summer ahead of you. What can you create? So for me,
all the investments or businesses that I started have come out of some kind of dream.
Like Tori, Chris also came from a waspy upbringing. But he was distinctly flashier.
He loves statement loofers. The kind that spell out things like heart across the toes. Like one
says H.E. The other shoe says A.R.T. He was also super into making money and waving it around.
Like some people haven't hear of Steve Jobs. But my comic book figure Richie Rich was kind of like
my hero because look, he had a gold pool. He had a ton of money. He could do whatever he wanted.
Chris got his start with a clothing company called Eagle's Eye and it was a big success.
He co-founded it in 1981 with his brother and his dad had cosigned alone for them.
They sold sweaters covered in preppy insignia. I'm talking teddy bears, teapots, mallards,
the type of stuff that people wore back in the 80s sort of unironically.
Chris manufactured these sweaters for cheap in Hong Kong and then he sold them at a big markup.
It was a good business. And at the time he met Tori, Chris and his brother had sold most of their
steak and eagle's eye for $60 million. He was moneyed and divorced. In other words, he was perhaps
the perfect match for ambitious young Tori. I thought she was cute as a button. And we started
to talk and with a very short period of time, it's that girl's fun, really cute. Sorry for the
quality of that recording, but it's very old. And then we had a weekend at my house, this is from
my perspective, and my girls who were really young, loved her. And she was playing tennis with
them and she was fun. And it just kind of stuck up on me. In 1996, they married. There was no
prenup. They were building a life together. Who needs a prenup? And they're wasps, right? I mean,
wasps don't like to talk about controversial things. Tori quickly had twins and then another
son. So if you're keeping count, she and Chris had six kids. It was a real Brady bunch over there.
Chris, meanwhile, kept making money. We started a company called Internet Capital Group.
And that company went from zero to five billion. Sounds like a company that would have crashed in
2000, right? But Chris says he got out in time. I took all that capital and I invested in some
of the coolest companies in the world. And, uh, lost water, um, jawbone and jam box. I've been
really fortunate to be kind of in like in the, in the mix. Tori and Chris became a staple on the
New York social scene. There's a saying, you know, there are some people who will go to the opening of
an envelope. Now they weren't quite that, but they were definitely out and about. Except Tori was
not content to just be a young trophy wife on Chris's arm, doing her exercise classes, sitting on boards.
She started to think that she might want to have a business of her own. And Chris was happy to help.
I said, Tori, I'm going to put up so much money. If we're going to do this business, we're going to do it right.
More after the break.
This is infamous from campsite media. To finance Tori Birch, LLC, Chris put up the initial investment
and he says that he raised even more money from their network of wealthy friends. In any case,
Tori's little business was super charged with cash. So now it's 2003. And let's picture this.
Tori is at home working on designs for her new brand. I worked out of my apartment for the first
two years. I had three boys and three stepdaughters that were all quite young running around.
If you're imagining some sort of loft apartment, like the shirt waste factory that went up in flames
because there's a million people working in a sweatshop, no, that's not what was going on here.
Tori was at her home, a 9,000 square foot palace. Three combined suites at the Pierre Hotel on the
Upper East Side. That's a five star hotel on the southeastern corner of Central Park, which has
sweeping views of the green treetops. And then you have Tori, the Eloise, sitting in her kitchen,
sketching out ideas on a notepad. There's a clothing rack that's perhaps parked by the kitchen island.
Maybe Tori looks at the drapes of fabric hanging in front of her. They are the chic
pieces that she ignored as a kid from her mother, Reba's closet and attic. What if she takes these
chic pieces and she combines them with her own wardrobe, crop jackets with harsh boxy shoulders,
soft cardigans. Let's put these two things together. I thought we could really have an interesting
concept if we took this idea of a luxury lifestyle brand but made it more accessible.
Now she just had to start selling clothes.
This space is about me. Tori opened her store. She was primed to be the next Donna
Karen or Diane von Furstenberg. People wanted to hear about Tori. They wanted to be Tori.
Okay, now it's three years later, 2006, Manhattan, New York, 9 a.m. The morning commute is in full
swing all across the city. Working women are coming out of the subway and they're holding
little maki-autos with foam in their manicured hands and they're rushing to their desks.
Maybe they're wearing trench coats, pencil skirts, sensible J-crew slacks,
but peeking out from underneath all these hems were the exact same pair of ballet flats.
It was like a shoe every single person had.
Justin Harmon, who we talked to earlier, saw these shoes everywhere. They were in different
colors of leather. They looked almost like little socks except for one very ornate difference.
Right on the toes, there was a big piece of gold and on that gold were carved two teas
mirrored back to back. It's like a gold embossed family crest almost. It's a lot. It's a lot.
It's probably the size of a silver dollar and it reflects the light and it'll take your eyes right
out. Despite the silver dollar sized piece of gold on the toe, these ballet flats were otherwise
lightweight and small enough to fit into your handbag. Really great for a girl in the go. You
pack in two little condom sized shoes and off you go. I wore this shit out of those shoes. I
thought they ruled. These were the Torrebert Riva flats. She named them after her mom. They were
not a pair of sky high heels that you would keep at your desk. They were sensible, comfortable,
versatile. You could wear them to the office and to brunch and still look put together.
They were the perfect manifestation of Torre's high-hand sporty and also preppy aesthetic.
And they were everywhere. Even my mom had those ballet flats. She had the orange ones. Very few
things sort of shifted everyone's attention. Like those shoes did. It was a major, major thing.
I haven't worn a shoe like that before and I haven't worn one since. But in the years like
2006, maybe 2009, they were all the rage. Let's be clear. Ballet flats were not a new idea.
Chanel pioneered them in the 50s. Jackie O and Audrey Hepburn popularized them. And by the 2000s,
Mark Jacobs was selling a $300 pair of ballet flats. But in this case, everybody wanted those
Torrebert Riva flats, mostly because of one important person's imprimatur. Now you could call
this person the original influencer. New York's style setter Torrebert is being hailed as the
next big thing in fashion. Oprah Winfrey. Again, it's great for different body types. Very nice.
Thank you. Oprah won of Torre's biggest fans, putting her products on her latest favorite things list.
Hard to define how much she helped us. The next day we had eight million hits on our website.
The Oprah effect is very real. When those Riva flats went on sale in 2006, almost 200 bucks a pop,
they sold like hotcakes. She moved more than 250,000 pairs in the first two years. That's nearly
$49 million. Forget penny lovers, the Riva flats were minting millions. So the birch business was
exploding. However, the birch marriage was imploding. Torrebert, to me, is like one of the unknowable
characters. She's been this kind of like perfectly imperfect. Really, I think the time said at one
point, perfectly perfect human being forever. More about this conflict and what it has to do with
a copycat of her store on the next episode of Infamous. I actually believe that we'll learn to fly at
some point. My parents tell me that negativity is nor is your heartache's husband get over it.
Infamous is executive produced, created and hosted by Gabrielle Sherman and me, Vanessa
Gregorriatus. Not only Robomhead wrote and reported this episode, our managing producer and editor
is Shoshish Malavitz. Heather Shrowing and I edited this episode and Grace Herman, Garrett Graham,
Rajiv Gola and Lily Hueson-Smith produced. David Devereaux sound design the episode and it was
recorded by Ewan Lai Trumuen. Some of this reporting appeared in Vanity Fair magazine.
Thank you so much. See you next week.
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