Island Unto Herself: How Rachel Scott Became the Face of the New Generation of American Fashion

Rachel Scott is a student of philosophy. So deep is her interest that she christened her label, Diotima, after Diotima of Mantinea, the only female voice in Plato’s Symposium. Diotima’s doctrine of Eros, as she explained to Socrates, is the cornerstone for our collective understanding of love.

“I never wanted to have a brand [with] my name because, for me, that wasn’t the point,” says Scott, who was born in Jamaica and relocated to New York in 2002 to study art, art history, and French at Colgate University before starting her career in fashion in Italy. Instead, she wanted to send a message.

Scott, 42, is warm and inviting. She is intellectual and practical and appears uninterested in, if still moved by, the slew of attention and accolades she’s received from the fashion industry since her breakout year in 2023. She won two consecutive statuettes at the CFDA Awards, American fashion’s most prestigious honors, first for emerging designer of the year and then for womenswear designer of the year in 2024.

Last September, she joined Proenza Schouler, the brand founded by Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez nearly 25 years ago, as its new creative director. (The pair have decamped for Paris to design Loewe.)

That same month, Scott made headlines for Diotima’s debut runway show. The following season, in February, Scott delivered another standout collection that features a collaboration with the estate of the late Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, and the first lady of New York City, Rama Duwaji, who thus far has kept the American fashion industry at arm’s length, sat in the front row.

In broad, romantic strokes, Diotima is Scott’s ultimate muse. She first came across the philosopher in Eros and Civilization, the 1955 book by German American philosopher and social critic Herbert Marcuse. “It talks about civilization in society and how oppressive it can be, and when [Diotima] comes into it, it’s with this idea that you can sublimate desire in a nonrepressive way to create, and I always found that really beautiful,” she says. The historian jury is out on whether Diotima of Mantinea truly existed. But Scott had been told by some philosopher professor friends well versed in Greek classics that if she did exist, “it’s very possible that she was a very specialized type of sex worker who educated,” Scott says, “which I think is very fab.”

Diotima became Scott’s Trojan horse in the chiffon trenches. The name was also intended by Scott to be a decoy. “Even though this was always meant to be something rooted in the Caribbean and me trying to propose a nonstationary, evolving notion of what the Caribbean is, I didn’t want it to be niche,” she says. “I wanted it to be something that could be appreciated by everyone.” That kind of universality in fashion, Scott argues, is usually only afforded to Europeans. “Their specificity is global,” she says, “but for us, it’s niche or exotic.”

“I think in the beginning, I was really trying to make a point against what everyone thought the Caribbean was,” Scott says. She wanted to expand past the exoticized idea of the islands, past the nostalgia that had moored this cultural perception of a specific era and look—think Bob Marley–infused ’70s style.

Scott, who speaks like a university professor, now resorts to another erudite philosopher: “I’ve been really obsessed these days with Édouard Glissant,” she says, and the writer’s idea that the culture in the Caribbean “escapes definition.” It’s why her collection, which is rooted in texture and anchored by Jamaican-made crochet, features everything from sensual and revealing knitwear to more severe and sophisticated tailoring. Diotima is a Jamaican brand, but it’s also a New York one by a designer trained in Italy. A certain cultural expansiveness is baked into its core look.

From Monday through Thursday, Scott works at Proenza Schouler. She pours her weekends and all of her free time into Diotima. Anyone less passionate or disciplined might question her commitment to working as much as she does. But speaking with Scott, one gets the impression that Diotima is an urgent extension of her own self.

She is transfixed with materializing the Diotima woman. “I don’t know who she is, maybe it’s who I want to be, or maybe it’s the women that I’m inspired by,” she says. “But this idea of Diotima, this radical, powerful, highly intellectual erotic woman, she’s always there. She’s been there since the beginning.”

Scott says she has “a real problem having a fixed notion of people.” The Diotima woman is evident in the group portrait accompanying this story, all friends and supporters of the designer: Scott’s confidant and the brand’s director of strategy and operations, Shin Ae Lee; creative producer Shay Johnson; gallerist Nicola Vassell; curator Ashley James of the Guggenheim Museum; model Romae Gordon; and American photographer Ming Smith. “I like this idea that maybe in what we’re doing, we’re inventing this big Diotima who explains love to us all,” Scott says.