TORY BURCH’S
BIG TIME
Reva-lution

The Tory Burch medallion is hard to miss. That gleaming double T-gilded saucer blooming from the tip of the Reva ballet flat. A beacon on the asphalt! The emblem first became ubiquitous in 2006, cameoing on the heels of college students and celebrities, and it certainly had a foothold in the professional sphere. I remember the powerful, polished, lacquered-to-perfection girls I saw wearing Revas in midtown New York; it became the footwear par excellence for metropolitan women, a golden compass pointing them to the boardroom.

Fast-forward to the 2020s, and the Tory Burch Reva flat is having a renaissance. Out of production since 2017, Tory resurrected the Reva from its shoebox sepulcher and elevated it to the Spring 2025 runway, styled with low-slung trousers in rich plum, crisp optic white, and a warped zebra print. Refreshed with a razor-sharp silhouette and silver beveled hardware, the Reva now feels like the footwear of women who guzzle martinis at Cervo’s after a day of vintage shopping.

“We loved the original Reva,” Burch tells me on a recent Zoom call, “but how do you touch something that was very classic to the brand and make it relevant for where we are today?”

The answer was to give it the cobbler’s equivalent of a deep-plane facelift. There is a sleek sexiness to the new Reva: Zoom in, and you’ll notice the medallion is now cut-out to show off some juicy toe cleavage. (Not all Revas will have this feature; some will maintain a covered toe bed.) The fit is different, too: chicly snug, but still super comfortable in buttery-soft leather.

My own history with the Reva pre-dates the reissue by a few years. I started wearing them in 2022, intrigued by their pert past and tickled by the realization that no one else had rediscovered them. I found a well-loved pair in classic black and gold — and then I found four more. I wore them constantly, with everything and anything: baggy, hip-hugging Eckhaus Latta jeans; a vintage Jean Paul Gaultier skirt; oversized Ralph Lauren pinstriped pants. My Revas complemented my sleek suits and gave a little wink to the gargantuan basketball shorts I stole from my husband. They even became my wedding after-party footwear of choice, their shiny heads peeking out from under my cream satin skirt.

When I started collaborating with the brand on social content for the fall 2023 show, a new generation of Tory girls were salivating over her kicky kitten heels and Pierced toe-ring mules. But I was still gravitating towards my Revas; in a way, the simple silhouette and classic logo make it a tabula rasa wardrobe piece, a chameleon akin to a Chanel 2.55 bag — a piece you can subvert and make entirely your own.

The bestselling ballet flat has tender origins. Back in 2006, it was named after Reva Robinson, Burch’s classically beautiful mother. “She had these rubber ballet flats,” says Burch. “I always saw my mom wearing them in the garden, and she reminded me of Audrey Hepburn. She wore them with cigarette pants, and it just looked so chic.”

The Revas catapulted the Tory Burch brand into megawatt stardom. In Hijacking the Runway (2014), author Teri Agins recalls how the glamorous brass medallion “jumped out like an Oreo cookie” and countered the Reva’s casual rubber sole. But for Burch, the medallion wasn’t meant to be the logo, per se.

“It was more of a design feature,” Burch says. “It was the tension of what the logo did on that shoe.” The combination was a hit, and by 2013, Tory Burch had sold five million pairs, according to Agins. The Reva also had an epic place in pop culture, from Oprah’s Favorite Things to Gossip Girl, where Tory herself even made a cameo in 2009.

By the mid-2010s, the ballet flat craze was waning, so it made sense for the company to scale back. Yet there was another reason: Burch didn’t want to be put in a box. Everyone knew her for the Reva, but she wanted to let other products shine.

Putting Reva in the corner in 2017 turned out to be good for the shoe. “It’s been a very constant drumbeat of people asking, ‘Please bring it back. We can’t find the colors we need. We can’t find this. We can’t find that,’” Burch says. “So I think it’s good to create a little distance so people can desire it again.”

The Reva is a peculiar piece within the brand’s comeback story; it needed that distance combined with the sis-boom-bah halo of the “Toryssance.” Still, how do you make a shoe with such strong connections to 2010s prep relevant in an era of unhinged personal style?

But the Reva’s comeback is beyond design-deep. There’s a fearlessness in how the brand seamlessly pairs the Reva of yore with its uber-cool current Tory 2.0 pieces. “It’s a little bit of the nostalgia element, but I also think it symbolizes all of the newness of Tory Burch—the idea that you can take something very classic and indicative of a singular brand, and make it your own by mixing it into your wardrobe,” says Brooke Bobb, fashion news director at Harper’s Bazaar.

“Obviously, there is extreme nostalgia in fashion right now, and it’s a fun style exercise to take what’s seen as outdated and seize on it and remind everyone it was really cool,” says Rachel Tashjian, fashion critic at the Washington Post. “Or change their mind and suggest they misunderstood it in the first place, like Kors Céline or Gaultier Hermès.”

Redefining the Reva is as big of a reinvention as a brand can get. “What’s special with Tory is that a lot of young women are seeing this powerful figure who’s been in fashion for as long as we can remember, and she decided to shake up what she’s doing and make really delightful, inventive, and sexy clothes instead of running on marketing autopilot,” adds Tashjian. “It’s inspiring to people that she made a huge pivot in her career—it shows women they don’t have to let people put them, or their clothes or shoes, in boxes.”

What better way to see that the Reva is out of the box, or rather, shoebox, than to see how young people are sporting it? At Parsons last year, Burch noticed that students wore their Revas with thick socks. According to her, the distance brings in a new customer. “We have a much younger customer today,” says Burch. “It's changed. What I love about our customers is that they’re so different. We definitely have the downtown girl, the uptown girl.”

Sasha Mutchnik, 28, can be classified as a Tory Burch downtown girl. The New York City–based writer and founder of the feverishly followed Instagram account @starterpacksofnyc, refers to “the Revas” as “the Torys” and scoured Poshmark for the shoe. She unearthed a leopard-print pony hair flat for $50. “I bought them because I knew they were bringing it back,” Mutchnik tells me. “But I wanted a more retro-looking colorway, something that felt early ’00s Kate Moss and Sienna Miller ballet flat-coded.”

Tory was right: Distance makes the foot grow fonder.