Tanya Taylor Unleashes Her Alter Ego With Delphine, a New Eveningwear Brand

The early 2010s was an exciting time for emerging designers in New York. They were young, cool, innovative and understood how people really wanted to dress — and, as a young writer, they were fun to cover. Tanya Taylor feels emblematic of that era, and more than a decade later, she’s built her namesake contemporary brand into a rare success story in indie fashion.

Years of consistent growth have brought the label to a place of financial stability that few ultimately achieve: In the first half of of 2024, sales increased 80% YoY. The brand’s first store, which opened last year in New York City’s Upper East Side, is already profitable, and new openings in Greenwich, CT and Palm Beach, FL are slated for 2025. In October, Taylor hired a CEO — a role she’d previously taken on herself. This helped free the designer up to finally pursue a concept that had been in the back of her mind since the very beginning of her fashion career.

Meet Delphine, Taylor’s new cool-girl eveningwear brand. Named after an imaginary muse the designer dreamed up back when she was applying to Parsons, it could very well be her second success story.

Despite not being a real person, Delphine’s backstory is important: Taylor was finishing up undergrad at McGill University, where she studied finance, and going through a (temporary) breakup with her now-husband.

“To apply to Parsons without having an undergrad in fashion, you had to make a mood board of who would be your dream human, your muse, your personality that you’d want to build a brand around,” Taylor explains. “I called this person Delphine Pratt,” Pratt being her then-ex’s last name. (On the mood board, Ms. Pratt had Tory Burch‘s face pasted onto Bianca Jagger’s body.)

“I was imagining this world in New York. I had never been before, so it was very fantasy and I was picturing this woman that was really smart, confident, but also mischievous, sexy, nocturnal,” Taylor recalls. She got into Parsons, but never pursued Delphine as a brand concept. Instead, the muse became Taylor’s nightlife alter-ego: “I ended up being very social, really loving my life in New York.”

Fast forward to the fall of 2012, when Taylor was planning her namesake brand’s first New York Fashion Week show at the MoMA. (I was there!) Her publicist at the time asked for her “list of people” to invite. The only problem: “I did not have any friends,” she recalls. “So I started putting ‘Delphine Pratt’ on our invite list.” The designer estimates she did this every season for about seven years.

Delphine lived on only in the recesses of Taylor’s mind until recently, when the concept for a second brand — one without her government name attached — began to crystallize. 

“I am 38 and I’m in a different part of my life than when I started our Tanya Taylor brand,” she says. “I needed a different personality to emerge. I wanted there to be a character and a separation from myself by starting second brand. And it felt really cathartic and also invigorating to build a world around an idea and to feel a little detached.”

Though Delphine, the “person,” was born out of fantasy, Delphine, the brand, is rooted in reality — albeit a distinctly fabulous one. “Delphine is the epitome of after-dark glamour and cool-girl insouciance,” reads a press release. “She’s as likely to be found on a fire-escape in Bushwick, cigarette in hand, as she is sipping a martini in Bemelmans at the Carlyle.”

It’s a line of luxurious, vintage-inspired formalwear without the level of preciousness, seriousness or costliness typically associated with the category. At $895-$2,195, it’s priced slightly lower than typical designer eveningwear, but it’s not quite contemporary, either. Taylor’s brick-and-mortar foray helped her identify an opportunity in this middle ground. Last November, in celebration of the label’s 10th anniversary and the holiday season, she designed a bow-adorned polka-dot dress just for her store’s window display. To her surprise, shoppers kept wanting to buy it.

“The reaction we had to that dress made me realize we could do this [new brand] because we had so many people coming in that were willing to wait four weeks to have it made custom for themselves. They were willing to spend $2,500, they were ages 18 to 80,” she says. “I thought, there’s a missing hole in how people do eveningwear.”

Prudently, Taylor started researching what already existed in the market. “Aesthetically, you could feel like you’re wearing cutouts and you look really sexy, or you could be wearing big, big ruffles and you feel too young,” she explains. She also looked at pricing: “I could spend $5,000 or I could spend $600…. It just kept coming to: Why is there nothing happening in the middle?”

When you view Delphine’s debut collection all together, as I did at a preview in Los Angeles at the Sunset Tower (a perfectly glamorous backdrop), the vision is clear. The brand identity is strong, as is the level of quality and craftsmanship of each dress; there’s also a delightful sense of individuality across the collection: Every SKU is truly unique, and each rack looked like it belonged in a real woman’s wardrobe, as opposed to a monobrand store. “I wanted it to feel like there was so much personality of the brand that people understood that there was a lot of value to what they were getting,” Taylor shares.

Getting to experiment again and launch a new brand after more than a decade in business is a “special” opportunity that Taylor doesn’t take for granted. “I feel more liberated,” she says. “How interesting is it to be 10, 11 years after starting something and get to do it again with the knowledge that you know? It feels refreshing to start something as a blank slate.”

Of course, she isn’t quite starting from scratch. She has well-established buyer relationships and, at launch, Delphine has already been picked up by a range of influential retailers including Moda Operandi, Kirna Zabete and a handful of regional specialty boutiques like Hampden Clothing in Charleston, SC and Canary in Dallas, TX. Per Taylor, “We really wanted to focus on specialty stores that know their customers, that have other brands within this playful eveningwear category.” Naturally, DTC is also part of the equation: Delphine has its own e-commerce and will stage a three-day takeover of Taylor’s namesake store.

Looking to Delphine’s future, Taylor is excited about opportunities around events and celebrity dressing (hence the aforementioned L.A. preview), but she’s not trying to get ahead of herself.

“I really want to learn from the first year, learn about the product, learn about the response from the customer, and bring joy to their lives and then figure out what avenue feels the smartest to invest in,” she says. “I’m almost more excited about seeing cool girls in New York wear this than I am about one amazing celebrity. I just want to go out at night and see girls wearing this. It would literally make me giggle nonstop.”

See Delphine’s full debut collection below.

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Source: Fashionista.com