Every fashion house keeps a founding object somewhere in its story, and for Tory Burch that object is a pair of sandals. In the ’60s her mother had them made to measure on Capri, flat leather things intended for nothing more vibrant than an island summer. And their memory eventually produced the Miller, the open-toed silhouette that has anchored the brand’s footwear business since 2008. Nearly two decades on, the Miller has passed through countless materials and moods, yet its newest reinvention may be its most endearing. For Splash, Tory Burch’s summer capsule collection, and its accessory-led second wave, the Splash Jelly collection, the shoe has been remade entirely in translucent jelly.
The new Miller sandals hold on to every detail of the original, laser-cut medallion included. Only now they come in a glossy thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU), a material as elastic and durable as it is transparent. The additions arrive in colourways whose names suggest a wearer who packed in 10 minutes and still brought exactly the right things. Pool Blue, Flamingo Pink, Sunshine Yellow and Root Beer Float do most of the storytelling on their own.
From there the idea keeps stretching. A Miller kitten heel in the same material sits on a slim cork sole, and suddenly the jelly shoe has somewhere to be after dark. Somewhere in the range there is even a pair with trompe l’œil toenails painted onto the footbed, which for sheer disarming charm may prove to be the favourite detail in the whole collection. On the dressier side of the catalogue sit the Romy City Sandals in three neutral palettes, reworked as a flexible lattice that could not care less about salt water.
The bags get the same treatment without simply repeating the wit. The Romy bucket, which earned its following by being useful in a way covetable bags rarely bother to be, turns up woven in raffia for anyone who prefers their summer textures natural. It then appears again in colour-blocked transparent PVC, which comes in a choice of two moods. One sets mint against aquatic blue, while the other leans darker into a cola-tinted brown.
The Ella tote follows in the same see-through construction, and against all that shine the label has been careful to place things made slowly. A Charlie bag arrives in blue-green crochet, and plain ribbed tanks come pinned with silk flowers, so the plastic never quite gets to dominate the room. The clothes lean the same way, cut light enough to forget about, in colours that behave as the sea does when you stare at it long enough, pale turquoise sliding into something deeper and moodier, with crochet working across the knitwear in patterns that look borrowed from moving water.
All of it was photographed where an idea of escapism was more or less invented. At GoldenEye in Jamaica, the retreat where Ian Fleming wrote his Bond novels, Anthony Seklaoui wisely lets Alex Consani and Sacha Quenby simply be on holiday. They drift on pool floats and wander the shoreline barefoot, their marine blues and clean whites slowly giving way to the warmer shades of late afternoon. The image everyone will surely remember is that of Consani balancing a pair of slides on her head with a cocktail in hand.
What lingers afterwards is how neatly Tory Burch closes the circle. A shoe born from her mother’s holiday on Capri returns 60 years later as an object built for someone else’s holiday entirely, translated into a material her generation would never have chosen and somehow becomes more itself for the change. The jelly and raffia will sell through and the season will turn, but heritage, she quietly suggests, is not a vault to be guarded. It is a memory worth replaying in brighter colours.
