Are you having a happy new year so far? Has 2016 been everything you dreamed it would be after the first few weeks? Still going to the gym and keeping up on that New Year’s resolution? Or have you slid back to your old habits? If you have, don’t worry – we’re not judging. In fact, I’m actually writing this on a laptop from a Ben & Jerry’s right now… OK, not really, but you get the point.
No? Well, the point is this: some of us are definitely off to a better start to 2016 than others. Take Tory Burch for example. The 49-year-old fashion designer didn’t wait long to ring in the new year in the best way possible. Burch got engaged to her boyfriend of one and a half years, Pierre-Yves Roussel.
“We are tying the knot…#blessed #engaged #happynewyear,” Burch wrote on her Instagram page last week under a photo of herself and Roussel arm-and-arm.
It’s not hard to understand why Burch feels “blessed.” In addition to getting engaged to the man she loves, Burch leads quite the life. The fashion designer is said to have newly acquired a 27-acre property in Antigua located in a members-only resort replete with terraces, a library, an orchid nursery, a guesthouse, a pool, a pool house, two (two!) greenhouses and an orchard.
The billionaire designer also has had the opportunity to travel the world and regularly posts pictures on Instagram taken everywhere from Cuba to Venice to Japan and everyplace in between.
Though her new engagement ring wasn’t visible in that photo it wasn’t long until it made its first appearance. And what an appearance it was! In a second photo that you can find here, Burch can be seen sitting in a kayak wearing pieces from her own Tory Sport “activewear” line, which just newly launched. More importantly, though, she’s seen showing off her new sparkler.
“Look at her engagement ring……. What. The. ****,” one commenter wrote.
Another chimed in with, “Holy cow dat rock.”
Burch didn’t dwell too much on the ring when she posted it. Actually, she didn’t really dwell on it at all. “Brilliant day in @torysport torysport.com #torysportcomingandgoing #torysportrunning #torysport #westindies,” was all she said in her caption of the photo in which she’s wearing the ring while sitting in the canoe in the sand on the side of a river in Antigua.
Yes, Burch’s engagement ring is quite impressive. Actually, impressive doesn’t even begin to cover it. Amazing is a little better, but it’s perhaps still an understatement for a rock that is so big that it’s (probably) visible from space.
For those unfamiliar with her, Tory Burch is, as mentioned, a fashion designer. Born in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania near Philadelphia in 1966, she moved to New York City after college and started TRB by Tory Burch in February 2004 before later renaming her line to simply Tory Burch.
Things really took off for her in April of 2005 when she got the Oprah bump. On her show, Oprah called the designer “the next big thing in fashion.” Was she destined to become the next big thing, or did Oprah make her the next big thing? We’ll never know for sure, but what we do know is her website got something almost as incredible as the diamond engagement ring she just received: the site registered eight million views the day after Oprah promoted it.
These days Burch has 160 stores around the world and has her products in over 3,000 department and specialty stores. Many describe her style as either preppy-boho or preppy-bohemian luxe.
Peirre-Yves Roussel wasn’t the first to ask for Burch’s hand. She previously wed William Macklowe, the son of a real estate tycoon, in 1993. The marriage lasted only a year. Burch got hitched again in 1996, this time to J. Christopher Burch, a wealthy investor at Internet Capital Group. The couple had three sons together: 18-year-old twins named Henry and Nick and a 14-year-old boy named Sawyer. The pair was divorced in 2006, but Burch (who was born Tory Robinson) kept his name. She even dated Lance Armstrong for a time in 2007!
Her new fiancé, Pierre-Yves Roussel is the Chairman and CEO of LVMH Fashion Group, which owns brands like DKNY and Marc Jacobs. The Paris-born businessman began his successful career by working in finance before moving into the fashion industry.
Rings for the Rest of Us
Sadly, we can’t all be billionaire fashion designers. But things aren’t so bad. In fact, your engagement ring prospects look every bit as amazing as Tory’s thanks to Birkat Elyon’s Russian Formula cubic zirconia engagement rings. Our rings are astonishingly affordable and look identical to the real thing. Amazingly, they capture the light exactly as real diamonds do, fooling the naked eyes of even veteran gemologists.