Inside Tory Burch's Embrace Ambition Summit
On Tuesday, designer and entrepreneur Tory Burch hosted her eponymous foundation's first-ever summit at Alice Tully Hall. Entitled "Embrace Ambition," the sold-out event was a spinoff of their #EmbraceAmbition campaign, which was launched last year to address the stereotypes and double standards women face, most often in the workplace.
The day was sprinkled with conversations on particular topics (like racial stereotypes, women in politics, women roles in Hollywood), personal stories, and performances by Nona Hendryx, St. Vincent, Jessie Reyez, and the Met Opera's Michael Fabiano. On the roster of participants were power players from the worlds of entertainment, politics, media, and more, including author Margaret Atwood, Grown-ish star Yara Shahidi, actress Julianna Margulies, Congressman Joe Kennedy III, journalist Katie Couric, Olympians Linsey Vonn and Ibtihaj Muhammad, and human rights activist Yeonmi Park.
Shahidi kicked off the summit in conversation with Burch. The 18-year-old actress and T&C modern swan, who is off to Harvard in the fall to study economics and history (Michelle Obama wrote her college recommendation letter), talked about her new initiative, Eighteen x 18, to encourage young people to vote. "Politics isn't marketed to my generation," said Shahidi, who started Eighteen x 18 after learning that only 52 percent of Americans voted. "Equity can be achieved only when we acknowledge that everyone has inalienably been given the right to exist and the right to thrive."
Atwood, whose 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale became an Emmy-winning hit series on Hulu (season two premiered this week), spoke of how inspiration for her book came from history-4,000 years of women telling their stories. Park, who escaped from North Korea in 2007 when she was just 13 years old, received a standing ovation for her speech, which implored everyone not to forget (and not to criminalize, as the media has done) the 25 million people who still live in the "darkest place in the world" with no food, no internet, and no rights. "How can people fight if they don't know they're slaves?" she asked.
Tina Tchen, who was Michelle Obama's chief of staff and is now spearheading the Time's Up Legal Defense Fund, remembered the stereotypes she had to deal with as an Asian female corporate litigator. She would enter meetings and it often took people over 30 minutes to realize she was even in the room, let alone that she was capable of leading the case. "It's the 21st century-we have to build workplaces that work for people, not for people to work for workplaces," she said. "We are in a very unique, transformative moment-if we seize it."
Multi-hyphenate comedian, writer, and producer Keegan-Michael Key and the comedian Maysoon Zayid talked about tackling race, disability, and gender stereotypes in their work. And producer/director/writer Elisa Pugliese detailed her struggles getting into the business as a woman, and how those struggles miraculously went away after she invented an imaginary co-writer named Frank Saladino. The poet Regie Gibson, who had been sitting in the audience all day typing mysteriously into his laptop, closed the event by reciting a piece he wrote inspired by all that he saw and heard.
Bank of America sponsored the summit, which was free to all attendees. See below for images from the day.
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