ディオティマのランウェイデビューは、カーニバルへの歓喜の賛歌でした。

Rachel Scott helms her Diotima label from a small studio in New York’s Chinatown. There’s a shop next door that sells jade, pendants and amulets hand carved to ward off illness and harm. Upstairs, Scott has similar ideas on her mind while preparing her first ever catwalk show, after four years of presentations that evoked her rich universe. It’s netted her accolades – international attention and two CFDA awards – one for Emerging Designer in 2023 and the second, last year, for Womenswear Designer of the Year, the most prestigious award on the roster. Those are usually – I think only – awarded to designers who have shown on the catwalk, figures like Marc Jacobs (who has won a record 15 CFDAs) or Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez of Proenza Schouler. 

Incidentally, Proenza is now part of Scott’s story too. Earlier this month she was announced as the new creative director of that brand. She fed into the label’s presentation earlier this week, although next season will be the true reflection of her new role, and a potentially profound professional shift. And that new position is part and parcel of an evolution in Scott as a designer, a shift in sensibility reflected in how and what she makes. 

She founded Diotima herself in 2021, using her own life savings. Every garment, therefore, had to have a reality at its core. “Everything had to sell,” Scott states, bluntly. “I couldn’t make something that wouldn’t. Now I feel less of that pressure.” The range, indeed, has expanded and, for her first catwalk show, Scott has allowed herself the levity of pieces that push technique, form and inspiration but, perhaps, aren’t the easiest to imagine on a department store rack. When they come to world building, however, they’re ripe.

They are also inherently reflective of Scott – her lived experiences, her beliefs. If she’s splitting her time between two labels, the experience seems to have doubled her down to define what Diotima means, framed through her own life and loves. Carnival was the inspiration for her catwalk debut – an apparent riposte, superficially, to Scott’s last presentation, inspired by anger and frustration at the shape and state of the world, especially in the USA. This time, there’s a joyful explosion of colour, volume, pattern and craft. But, Scott states, it’s still about protest – the notion of carnival within the Caribbean and diaspora. “Carnival is a moment of resistance,” says Scott. “Exuberance, sometimes erotic, but a rebellious opposition to oppressive forces.” Read into that what you will about the here and now, especially in New York Fashion Week.

The characters of carnival – inverted sailors, stripped of authority and power, the ultra-femme baby Doll, and the Dame Lorraine, a traditional masquerade character from Trinidad and Tobago Carnival that mocks elaborate European aristocratic fashions – were all represented. “In carnival, there’s always a cage bra. I was thinking in the inverse. Not building the bra, but building framing around where the bra would be,” Scott explained, of looks that scoop low around the décolleté. Sailor’s uniforms surrendered square-cut collars on her tops and dresses, while her Dame Lorraine is dressed in extravagant ruffled gowns ballooning out at the knee. “It has a life to it,” Scott says as she grabs one, shakes it. It floats in the hand, a contradiction to its apparent heft. “I never want to make something heavy – with boning, horsehair. I never want to make someone uncomfortable in my clothes. It always has to feel good,” she states. “We’re getting the form without the repression.” 

There’s crochet, of course – a Diotima signature, one still made in the Caribbean, by hand, and overseen by Scott’s mother. Indeed, Scott said she’d taken stock and delved back into her archives around creating this first show, to realise that almost 60 per cent of her work contains handcraft. “Which is wild,” she laughs.

“It’s personal – it always has been,” Scott states. She’s talking of the craft – but the inspirations are personal too. “Everything is a manifestation of what is around me.” Which means that active resistance is built into these clothes, in clashing shades of passionfruit and lime, in the handwork of crochet and open worked seams. In every stitch. The fact she makes clothes with meaning is why Diotima has quietly become New York’s must-see – and why Rachel Scott, equally quietly, seems poised to take over the rest of the world too.

Rachel Scott helms her Diotima label from a small studio in New York’s Chinatown. There’s a shop next door that sells jade, pendants and amulets hand carved to ward off illness and harm. Upstairs, Scott has similar ideas on her mind while preparing her first ever catwalk show, after four years of presentations that evoked her rich universe. It’s netted her accolades – international attention and two CFDA awards – one for Emerging Designer in 2023 and the second, last year, for Womenswear Designer of the Year, the most prestigious award on the roster. Those are usually – I think only – awarded to designers who have shown on the catwalk, figures like Marc Jacobs (who has won a record 15 CFDAs) or Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez of Proenza Schouler. 

Incidentally, Proenza is now part of Scott’s story too. Earlier this month she was announced as the new creative director of that brand. She fed into the label’s presentation earlier this week, although next season will be the true reflection of her new role, and a potentially profound professional shift. And that new position is part and parcel of an evolution in Scott as a designer, a shift in sensibility reflected in how and what she makes. 

She founded Diotima herself in 2021, using her own life savings. Every garment, therefore, had to have a reality at its core. “Everything had to sell,” Scott states, bluntly. “I couldn’t make something that wouldn’t. Now I feel less of that pressure.” The range, indeed, has expanded and, for her first catwalk show, Scott has allowed herself the levity of pieces that push technique, form and inspiration but, perhaps, aren’t the easiest to imagine on a department store rack. When they come to world building, however, they’re ripe.

They are also inherently reflective of Scott – her lived experiences, her beliefs. If she’s splitting her time between two labels, the experience seems to have doubled her down to define what Diotima means, framed through her own life and loves. Carnival was the inspiration for her catwalk debut – an apparent riposte, superficially, to Scott’s last presentation, inspired by anger and frustration at the shape and state of the world, especially in the USA. This time, there’s a joyful explosion of colour, volume, pattern and craft. But, Scott states, it’s still about protest – the notion of carnival within the Caribbean and diaspora. “Carnival is a moment of resistance,” says Scott. “Exuberance, sometimes erotic, but a rebellious opposition to oppressive forces.” Read into that what you will about the here and now, especially in New York Fashion Week.

The characters of carnival – inverted sailors, stripped of authority and power, the ultra-femme baby Doll, and the Dame Lorraine, a traditional masquerade character from Trinidad and Tobago Carnival that mocks elaborate European aristocratic fashions – were all represented. “In carnival, there’s always a cage bra. I was thinking in the inverse. Not building the bra, but building framing around where the bra would be,” Scott explained, of looks that scoop low around the décolleté. Sailor’s uniforms surrendered square-cut collars on her tops and dresses, while her Dame Lorraine is dressed in extravagant ruffled gowns ballooning out at the knee. “It has a life to it,” Scott says as she grabs one, shakes it. It floats in the hand, a contradiction to its apparent heft. “I never want to make something heavy – with boning, horsehair. I never want to make someone uncomfortable in my clothes. It always has to feel good,” she states. “We’re getting the form without the repression.” 

There’s crochet, of course – a Diotima signature, one still made in the Caribbean, by hand, and overseen by Scott’s mother. Indeed, Scott said she’d taken stock and delved back into her archives around creating this first show, to realise that almost 60 per cent of her work contains handcraft. “Which is wild,” she laughs.

“It’s personal – it always has been,” Scott states. She’s talking of the craft – but the inspirations are personal too. “Everything is a manifestation of what is around me.” Which means that active resistance is built into these clothes, in clashing shades of passionfruit and lime, in the handwork of crochet and open worked seams. In every stitch. The fact she makes clothes with meaning is why Diotima has quietly become New York’s must-see – and why Rachel Scott, equally quietly, seems poised to take over the rest of the world too.