Models Abby Champion and Selena Forrest celebrate the holidays seaside in the Tory Burch Holiday 2022 Campaign by Oliver Hadlee Pearch [IG]. Shot in the south of France, the campaign is sophisticated festive, perhaps inspired by Tory Burch’s own holiday getaway home at Antigua’s Mill Reef club, situated atop a spectacular coastline.

Burch’s home was previously owned by Bunny Mellon.

Don’t fret that Tory Burch is anti-Christmas. If we stop by the Tory Burch website, red and green abound.

The Tory Burch 2022 Holiday Campaign introduces new Kira mini bags with Thanksgiving-time shipping. And while we associate the campaign’s silvery blue mood with the sea, let’s also remember that Hanukkah begins Sunday, December 18 this year and ends on December 26.

With all that is going on in the world this minute, I checked Tory Burch’s pedigree and discovered a fascinating bit of information about her background.

Burch is Jewish on her mother’s side and she attended the Agnes Irwin School in Rosemont, Pennsylvania, located in in Bryn Mawr on the Philadelphia Main Line.

Agnes Irwin is an All-Girls College Preparatory School for PreK–Grade 12, founded by a great-great-granddaughter of America’s founding father, the unconventional and not conservative Benjamin Franklin.

Irwin later became the first dean of Radcliffe College. Before Harvard became co-ed, Radcliffe was sister school to the all-male Harvard University.

Today the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University is one of the world’s leading centers for interdisciplinary exploration. Boy, do we need that intellectual approach! The website says “We bring students, scholars, artists, and practitioners together to pursue curiosity-driven research, expand human understanding, and grapple with questions that demand insight from across disciplines.”

This philosophy is a cornerstone of Tory Burch’s life work, one very much anchored in women’s lives and achievements.

Listening to the totality of the US Supreme Court’s oral arguments on affirmative action this week, I was reminded that during the 1920s Harvard revised its admissions policy strictly to reduce the number of Jewish students. The practice existed across the entire Ivy League.

Women were not admitted at all. Period. End of the subject.

Whether she intended to make a subliminal statement or not in her color scheme for the Tory Burch Holiday 2022 Campaign, I appreciate the gift of blue in this moment. It feels refreshingly ecumenical, at a time when brands are exploring exactly what traditions mean within the context of today’s world.

Hands down, Ralph Lauren has no peer in this realm of recasting the truth of the American experience. But Tory Burch is traveling on the same moonbeam — with an added emphasis on women’s lives and achievements. I love her for that long and sincere contribution to telling women’s stories.

If one positive experience has come from all the drama over Kanye West and his desire to rip America apart as a MAGA lover — and now Hitler, too — it’s that many of us got up off the sidelines, and the fight is on.

Anne of Carversville has never lived on the sidelines, since the day I launched a simple blog in 2007 in Carversville — down the road from the Hadid sisters today — inspired by Angelina Jolie’s commitment to Daniel Pearl, the WSJ reporter who was brutally beheaded in Pakistan on February 1, 2002.

I did not intend to veer so off-course in this simple holiday campaign post. But AOC has never examined fashion from an aloof perspective.

One of Kanye’s right-wing, Swedish buddies played his music to an assault on the memory of Anne Frank this week. Misogyny 101 is make her a slut, and that is exactly what happened. The day before, Kanye had descecrated the memory of Emmett Till, by making himself a martyr like Till.

I thought I would vomit, but now I am just mad.

{Smiling} So this little Anne tangent is all your fault, Tory Burch. If you had just done red and green — and not blue — in your holiday 2022 campaign, I never would have written this post. Just call me a hyper-sensitive, emotional creative with a backbone of steel. ~ Anne