Tory Burch Challenged a Class Full of Fashion Students to Reimagine the Classics
The designer recently mentored a group of MFA students at Parson’s School of Design and asked them to reimagine American sportswear
Reported by Harper's Bazaar.
What makes a classic? Not just longevity — staying power requires a reason. Tory Burch has been sitting with that question for a while. At her Fall 2026 show in February, she told reporters backstage that she built the collection around a single provocation: "Why do things endure?" Her answer came in the form of Shetland wool sweaters and corduroys lifted from her father's wardrobe, cocoon-shaped metallic jacquard coats, ruched silk dropwaists, and slouchy knits layered over Peter Pan collars — pieces that felt simultaneously inherited and invented. Familiar, but not nostalgic. Durable in the way only truly considered clothes can be.
That tension between heritage and reinvention is the DNA of American sportswear — a design language that has always fused pragmatism with glamour. And according to Harper's Bazaar, Burch decided to make it a live experiment this spring, partnering with 18 Parsons School of Design MFA students and challenging them to reimagine what classic American sportswear means today, drawing on her past collections and their own histories.
What the Students Made of It
The results were not safe. Hera Ford titled her collection "Lagetta La'ghetto," rooting it in her family's history as Black sharecroppers in the American South. She worked with denim, copper, and traditional indigo dyeing, drawing a direct line between her ancestors' clothing and a lace-like fiber — harvested from the bark of the Caribbean Lagetta Lagetto tree — that Indigenous and enslaved women used to make garments entirely their own. Her collection notes stated plainly that the "American Classic" is inseparable from the exploited Black labor that helped build it. Alexia Magdaleno brought a Chicano lens to Burch's oversized silhouettes and strong-shouldered button-downs. Mason Strange, from Greensboro, North Carolina — one of the country's historic centers of denim production — reworked Burch's Spring 2022 Claire McCardell collection through denim and quilting. Mia Cho, who grew up in Korea consuming Clueless and Gossip Girl like a second language, built a preppy fantasy out of experimental weaving, graphic prints, and cropped jackets with tie motifs caught mid-gust — her imagined American high school, finally made real in fabric.
Cho described the collaboration as rare access in an industry where getting a major brand's attention can feel close to impossible. Burch, for her part, called the experience "extremely energizing" — citing the students' new techniques, unexpected perspectives, and the way their personal stories surfaced throughout the work. Both sides, it seems, got something they needed.
The most interesting thing about American style has never been the classics themselves — it's who gets to claim them, rewrite them, and make them mean something new.
Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.
