Designer Tanya Taylor Has an Alter Ego—and She’s Ready to Introduce Her to the World

Delphine Pratte was on the guest list for Tanya Taylor’s first-ever runway show back in 2013. She didn’t make it—she didn’t even RSVP—but, for many years, she remained among the names of friends and family the designer would send her PR team as they planned events and sent out invitations, even though she never responded. 

What Taylor declined to tell her team was that Delphine Pratte wasn’t real. (Maybe they caught on when they noticed her alleged address was the same as that of the designer’s apartment.) She’s a sort of alter ego for the designer, developed while she was a student at McGill University, newly single and with dreams of moving to New York and enrolling at Parsons. 

“I was literally sitting in a very dark living room with four roommates on a black IKEA couch. I was kind of sad, and I needed to put together a mood board for a muse to get me into Parsons—I didn’t know how to sew at this time, and that was the application,” she remembers. “So, I thought to myself, ‘Who do I want to be sitting in this little dark hole? I want to be someone who’s spontaneous. I want to be happy. I want to have freedom. I want to feel fun. I want to be magnetic.’” 

In that first collage, Delphine Pratte had Tory Burch’s face, Bianca Jagger’s body, and was enveloped by the fabric of New York City. Taylor did, indeed, end up moving and enrolling at Parsons—she also went on to work for the Olsen twins at Elizabeth and James before starting her own brand in 2013. Delphine Pratte was mostly pushed to the back of her mind until a publicist working on her debut runway show asked her for her personal invite list. 

“I felt so embarrassed because I didn’t have that many friends, and he’s like, ‘We have to fill this with 300 people,’” she says. “I was so nervous, I put Delphine Pratte on the list as an imaginary friend with my home address. I continued to keep her on my list for all of our shows because I felt like I needed her there. I needed to feel that I had one more friend.” 

Delphine may be new to you, me, and the long-established Tanya Taylor customer, who, for over a decade, has turned to the brand for easy wedding guest dresses, everyday separates, and colorful prints. But she’s always been a part of the designer’s story, both personal and professional. 

“I have two very different sides of me,” Taylor admits. “I have a very practical, realistic, business-driven, contemporary-loving mom side of me, who’s grounded in reality. Then, I fully have this fantastical dreamer creative side that was really present when I first moved to New York and that I want to tap into more. My friends all know about this side of me, this Delphine personality that wants to stay out late, be a bit more extra, be a little bit more surprising.” 

Last March, as she prepared for her brand’s 10-year birthday party at Manhattan’s famed Carlyle Hotel, Taylor did what she normally does when she has a special occasion on her calendar: She made herself a look—a polka-dotted mini dress with a train and a big bow in the back. What she did differently this time, though, was, afterward, she put the dress on display in the window of her store on Madison Avenue.

“We didn’t have any stock—we just put it there to test the waters,” she says. “We had over 30 people ages 18 to 80 who were willing to wait a month and pay $2,500 to have this dress.” (The 80-year-old ended up wearing it to her 50th wedding anniversary. Taylor has a video I’m dying to see.)

That was the catalyst for Delphine, the new eveningwear-focused brand from the team at Tanya Taylor, completely distinct from the established namesake label, launching on Nov. 13. 

“It’s been inside me for 20 years,” she says. “I’ve always loved a more glamorous, more fun, more nocturnal, more party side of fashion. I wanted to spend the last 10 years building a brand that was approachable and inclusive—a wardrobe—but I think, in the back of me, I was itching to make more fanciful pieces.”

Much of Delphine came out of Taylor’s personal needs as an admitted social butterfly and triple Sagittarius. (“I come alive in the night—if anyone texts me at 12, ‘Do you want to show up here?’ I’m there.”) It led her to identify what she describes as a “white space” in the eveningwear market that marries price, quality, and style. 

“I have so many things to go to at night, and I felt like the only things I could buy were skin-tight with cutouts or really heavy matronly dresses,” she says. “This has an approachable price point for eveningwear, but also a little bit of a lightness and levity to what I think was missing. I look at old brands that I still have in my closet and are my go-to’s, and I don’t see them in the market anymore. I want to make that, and I want to bring that to a customer.”

The inaugural collection is filled with elegant but not fussy dresses—a one-shouldered ruffled polka dot gown, an ankle-length column dress with a train, an ’80s-style party mini in hot pink—made from fabrics that feel substantial but aren’t stiff (a nylon faille instead of a silk faille, for instance) and cut in silhouettes that feel youthful and easy, but have structure to them. (The team tested the samples to ensure they’d be suitable for dancing.) 

Delphine will have two deliveries a year (Tanya Taylor operates on the contemporary calendar, which has more frequent drops) and will be sold at luxury e-tailer Moda Operandi and on its own e-commerce site. (Kirna Zabête, another high-end boutique, will begin stocking it in the spring.) The collections are much smaller and sit at a higher price point than the main line, though still lower than most eveningwear brands—between $900 and $2,000. One drawback: The line only goes up to a size US 14, whereas Taylor’s namesake brand goes up to US 22 and 3X on select styles. Delphine will make pieces on a custom-order basis, but that service will be available only at the Tanya Taylor store on Madison Avenue for the time being as the team tests out the best way to cater to its clientele. 

While developing the brand, Taylor compiled a new mood board for Delphine Pratte. This time, it was filled with “a lot of nostalgia around what my nightlife looked like when I first lived here in 2007,” she says, and the people who frequented downtown hot spots like the Beatrice Inn, including  Chlöe Sevigny, Jen Brill, Harley Viera Newton. “I feel like all those girls were having so much fun, and there’s a version of them that I want to bring back that this younger generation is also looking for in vintage, and there’s not an easy brand for them to go to.” 

The look isn’t indie sleaze, but there’s a simpatico energy with the resurgence of and growing interest in that specific era of fashion. “I feel like it was this time where girls got dressed up to go out—you would wear this out at night, and it didn’t feel like you were necessarily going to a wedding. You were just having fun in it,” Taylor says. “I found my style during those years. I was working for the first time in New York, and I was experimenting with fashion, buying a lot of vintage. It’s fun to bring that back.” 

To further the nostalgia, each look is named after a ‘90s or ‘00s character Taylor loves, such as Mia Wallace from Pulp Fiction, Corey Mason from Empire Records, and Cleo Marco from Somewhere. (There’s also a Charlotte dress, which is surprisingly not a nod to SATC but instead Julianne Moore’s character in A Single Man.) 

While Taylor and her team are intently differentiating Tanya Taylor from Delphine—creating a distinct voice, aesthetic social media presence, and retail strategy—there is some overlap. For example, Delphine will be taking over the Tanya Taylor boutique for three days once it launches to allow customers to immerse themselves in her world and familiarize themselves with the line. The customer there, she says, is “absolutely this and is also absolutely our Tanya Taylor brand.” The store, which opened in September 2023 and Taylor says is already profitable in its first year, has also been crucial in developing Delphine.

“Every day, let’s say we’ve got 20 new purchasers that are teaching us something. Those people are embedded in our decisions for Delphine and also for Tanya Taylor,” she says. “I get an email every day at 6:30 that tells me about every single person that walked in, what they bought, what they didn’t like, what their lifestyle is. So, let’s say that they needed to be the mother of the bride or they’re going to a bachelorette party and couldn’t find something—I’m collecting all those holes, and, when I’m building this, I’m making sure I’m checking those. It’s really fun to feel like you’re playing match-up with people’s needs.”

Delphine also comes 12 years into a successful existing fashion business, which is a massive advantage. “We keep saying it’s like a new brand without new-brand problems,” Taylor says. “We have a team of 40 people that know how to make things, how to source things, how to work domestically and overseas. There’s just an engine that I didn’t have when I started our brand. I started with one person and had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know how you would finance something, [how to manage] cash flow, how to ship, how you would get a store to come see it. Everything was from scratch.” 

In addition to letting her flex a different creative muscle, Delphine allows Taylor to dip into certain spaces she hasn’t explored as much through the namesake brand—namely, the red carpet. The designer took the new collection to Los Angeles ahead of the launch to meet with stylists and Hollywood types, with the hopes of positioning Delphine in that spotlight. (Though Tanya Taylor has had countless celebrity appearances over its decade-plus in business, they’ve mostly been for daytime events or “off-duty” moments.) 

Delphine comes at a big inflection point for the Tanya Taylor business: In addition to celebrating 10 years and opening its first store, the brand brought in its first CEO, Kate Spade New York alum Adrianne Kirszner, last month. Sales in the first half of the year are up 80% year over year, with its DTC business up over 210%. More brick-and-mortar locations may be on the horizon in the new year. 

Delphine represents a new kind of challenge. “What I love about having this brand is I get to create some kookier things, and that’s in me,” she says. “When I used to do shows and stuff, I always liked to make them a little bit more surprising and inventive. I still love doing that with our brand, but I think I get to do it a little differently.” 

There are a handful of details Taylor is still working out, like when Delphine’s birthday is. (The team is leaning towards February, but they don’t think she’s a Pisces.) But she’s having fun exploring this other side of herself and developing a character through design: “I can filter it through someone else’s personality, and it’s really refreshing.”

You can shop Delphine’s first collection at www.delphinenyc.com starting November 13.