Latest news with #refinement
Vogue
5 days ago
- Business
- Vogue
A New Chapter for Tory Burch
From its inception in 2004, Tory Burch projected an idea of leisure and refinement, outfits that could be worn while pruning the hydrangeas of an estate but were also beloved by suburban moms making midday trips to Kroger. Gallery owner Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, a friend for many decades, remembers Burch showing her some of her father's golf sweaters very early on: 'She had this notion of an old-world Americana sportswear that people wore in country clubs. She understood that there was a niche business missing, and she wanted it affordable.' The languorous aesthetics that the brand radiates can obscure just how much scrappy hustle it took to get it off the ground. The company's first investors were friends and family, who were asked to put in 'only what they could afford to lose,' Burch says, which was sometimes just a few thousand dollars. Even then, Burch had an idea that she wanted a broader purpose for the business. 'I'll never forget, I sat on the couch of one of our first investors and I said, 'I want to start a global lifestyle brand so I can start a foundation.' And he was like, 'Don't ever say that.'' (The Tory Burch Foundation was officially launched in 2009 and has distributed $2 million in grants to female business owners and many millions more through a loan program; its current goal is to add $1 billion to the economy by 2030.) Lately Burch has been focused purely on the creative side of her company. 'Designers get pigeonholed and put into a box. People are seeing beyond that,' she says As the company grew, Burch desperately wanted to keep her personal life separate from her professional one, and that wariness made her closed off at times, she acknowledges. But she had good reason to desire privacy: She and Chris Burch were going through a protracted divorce. (They're now friends.) When I ask her what she thinks people misunderstand about her past, it's the idea that she strolled into success. 'I think people have this perception that things were easier,' Burch says. 'But just physically, the amount of work, and the hours from eight in the morning to ten at night, every night. Sometimes falling asleep at four in the morning, and doing it all with little babies.' 'The idea that women have to do more with less,' says the businesswoman and financier Mellody Hobson, now a good friend of Burch's, 'it's just a given. We don't even talk about that.' When we met in her office, Burch discussed this time in her life with some care, aware that she did not want to complain while sitting on her plush sofa, sipping a Diet Coke, with cloth napkins set out by her assistants. 'What I'm saying,' she articulated, 'is that it was excruciating, the amount of work it took to build this company. And women are held to different standards.'
The Guardian
07-08-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
Bert Wraith obituary
My father, Bert Wraith, who has died aged 93, was a metallurgist and expert in the dispersion of gases in metals, a key process in refinement. He developed a method for studying bubbles injected into water that led to the design of useful processes for metals, including the idea of a cyclone to clean liquid metals. In 2018 he was part of a group awarded a Royal Society prize. This was for work done at Swansea University on a laser-based system enabling the continuous monitoring of molten metal during the steelmaking process without the need to shut the furnace down. Born in South Shields, Bert grew up in York, where he went to Nunthorpe grammar school, Bert attributed his curiosity to his father, Albert, a locomotive fireman who fostered in him a passion for engineering, travel and steam trains. His mother, Dorothy (nee Watson), was a homemaker and keen bridge player. Bert graduated in metallurgy at Leeds University in 1954, then travelled to Nkana-Kitwe in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, to work as a metallurgist for Anglo American, smelting and refining copper and cobalt. His love of Africa never left him. He returned to the UK in 1957, and, after doing his national service at the UK Atomic Energy Authority, Aldermaston, married Marie Goodenough, a sculptor, in 1958. Bert then began teaching at Newcastle University, where he completed his PhD and established a research unit devoted to understanding the process of metal refining. He mentored 17 PhD students in the UK and Zambia, many of whom became close friends. He also enjoyed lengthy collaborations in Canada, most notably with the Australian metallurgists Ralph Harris at McGill University, Montreal, where Bert was an adjunct professor, and Phillip Mackey, whom he latterly worked with on the history of metallurgy, including the sheathing of the copper-bottomed ship Edwin Fox. Bert retired from his senior lecturer post at Newcastle in 1996. At 85, he was invited to join the 'Energy in Store' initiative with the Science Museum to improve access to scientific artefacts. A proud Geordie, Bert was a supporter of the North Eastern Locomotive Preservation Group. He was also a kind and modest man with a wry sense of humour and a social conscience. He was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease aged 87 but continued to read the Guardian and complete killer sudokus until a few months before he died. Bert is survived by Marie, their two daughters, Louise and me, and four grandchildren, Kristen, Logan, Nathaniel and Sadie.
