Ralph Lauren’s former digital chief launches Web3 fashion platform

While at Ralph Lauren, Delahunt led a project to dress Bitmoji in digital Ralph Lauren in August of 2020, becoming the first luxury brand to partner with the Snap-owned avatar company. Since then, the avatar landscape has become a key arena for tech companies to tap into the fashion industry, and its role in shaping online identities: 85 per cent of the 13 to 24-year-old Gen Z US population have a Bitmoji avatar; Meta and Apple now offer detailed avatar customisation; and startups including Ready Player Me and Genies are competing for branded partnerships and institutional funding.

During Delahunt’s tenure, Ralph Lauren also partnered with South Korean metaverse platform Zepeto, and Roblox, where a temporary holiday experience in late 2021 offered players the opportunity to dress in vintage Ralph Lauren pieces, effectively educated Gen Z about the brand’s heritage while giving access to hard-to-find physical pieces.

Since then, interest in digital fashion has proliferated, and an underlying blockchain layer has become increasingly relevant in terms of ownership, revenue and democratisation of talent. Delahunt calls it a tipping point, with changes from blockchain, AR, VR and consumer-friendly design tools leading to a renaissance. “We’re going to see this wild intersection of creativity and technology that will actually disrupt design in the way we saw the last 10 years of content being disrupted,” she says. “I think there are going to be the next versions of Netflix and TikTok and all the major platforms that we don’t even know about yet. We also have to remember MySpace, which was in 2003, one of the most visited platforms in the US and it fell as fast as it rose.”

Delahunt also says that physical pieces are a planned component of Syky’s business model, noting the expansion of AR used to add a digital layer in retail and with products. Already, heritage brands including Nike, Prada and Puma, as well as digital-first players such as RTFKT and 9dcc have leaned heavily in this direction through digital-phygital products linked through NFTs. After all, there is still a need for expressing our identities in all walks of life. The new Rtkft-Nike co-branded hoodie, for example, gives wearers AR wings.

The space is still nascent, and in the meantime, she says, more bridges are needed between traditional fashion, new talent, and technology. “I just feel the time is now. We are in the middle of history — and how cool to be able to do something in this space.”

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