New New York Woman Rising
Rachel Scott, founder of Diotima and newly appointed designer at Proenza Schouler, is positioning herself not to build a gigantic brand but to upend fashion’s status quo from within a conservative industry. Fresh off major prizes from the CFDA and recognition from LVMH and Vogue, she met Anna Wintour and accepted that her independent label would never rival the biggest businesses in size, redirecting her ambitions toward cultural impact instead. Her goal at Proenza Schouler is to reclaim what a New York brand can be and who gets to define it, using clothes as a subtle form of political and social intervention rather than overt activism.
Scott, who identifies as an immigrant, Black, queer woman with a disability, stands in stark contrast to the mostly white male designers who have recently filled top creative roles at big houses amid an industry slowdown and consumer backlash over prices. Taking over a label once synonymous with the uptown‑downtown gallery scene, she intends to prove she can grow Proenza to a globally competitive level while running Diotima, and at the same time rethink what New York fashion represents. For her, fashion mirrors a world that has veered rightward, and she sees herself as an insurgent carving out meaning in a space that is resistant to change.
Since formally assuming control of Proenza Schouler in summer 2025, Scott has barely had time to move into the SoHo office once occupied by founders Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez; their books and even a wilting cactus still linger as evidence of a transition in progress. She jokes that “the mess is mine,” lugging makeup, fabric swatches, notebooks and a copy of Hélène Cixous’s “The Book of Promethea” in her Phoebe Philo tote as she lives between the Proenza workspace and her Diotima studio on Canal Street. The physical strain of commuting between the two studios underscores her “show bunker” mentality as she prepares her first Proenza collection under intense scrutiny as the New York shows’ opening act.
Though she technically lives in Brooklyn with her wife, gender‑justice advocate Chaday Emmanuel, Scott is effectively camped out at the office as Fashion Week approaches. Emmanuel notes that Scott’s days, once already long, now stretch late into the night, reflecting the dual demands of running both a heritage label and an insurgent independent brand. For Diotima, Scott is collaborating with the estate of Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, while her Proenza work draws instead on dense feminist and philosophical references, signaling two distinct but complementary creative temperaments.
Scott characterizes Diotima as visceral and Proenza as cerebral: one rooted in craft and Caribbean heritage, the other in theory and structure. For the Proenza debut, she immersed herself in feminist texts like Luce Irigaray’s “Speculum of the Other Woman” and Pasolini’s film “Teorema,” mining them for ideas about desire, power and the hidden lives of bourgeois women. In conversation, she exudes calm but also an unyielding resolve, suggesting that once she commits to a project she becomes all but immovable.
Her path to this moment began in Jamaica, where her father designed furniture and her mother worked as a flight attendant for Air Jamaica while running a boutique in Kingston. As a teenager, Scott used a portable Singer sewing machine to make “tiny skirts and triangle bikinis” for clubbing, not out of a childhood dream of becoming a designer but out of a practical need for clothes she actually wanted to wear. Later, at Colgate University, she double‑majored in fine arts and French literature and bonded with future Diotima strategist Shinae Lee, already thinking about how to place Jamaica at the center of her creative life.
Initially, Scott flirted with a career in magazines, inspired by Italian Vogue, but an internship at Vogue changed her mind when a fleeting hallway encounter with Wintour left her feeling out of place. She pivoted to design school at Istituto Marangoni in Milan, then moved through a series of fashion jobs at Costume National, J. Mendel and Elizabeth and James before landing an eight‑year stint with indie New York designer Rachel Comey. The pandemic triggered what she calls an existential crisis: as an immigrant, she had spent her life chasing security, but COVID convinced her that security was an illusion and she needed work that made each day feel meaningful.
Scott became a U.S. citizen in 2020 and soon after founded Diotima, a label that elevates traditional Jamaican crochet to the level of French lace and treats Jamaican craftspeople as core artistic collaborators. She frames the brand as an “anti‑imperialist project” that shifts fashion’s center of value away from Europe and toward the Caribbean, despite fears about how the industry might react. Early support, including orders by 2021 and a partnership with stylist Marika‑Ella Ames, helped prove there was a market for a Jamaica‑forward vision that transcended clichés about rum, Bob Marley and colorful shacks.
Financing Diotima largely through prize money, Scott still recognized she needed a more stable revenue stream to grow, which made the Proenza role appealing as both an economic and creative platform. At Proenza she can explore ideas that sit outside Diotima’s specific cultural mandate, testing a broader vocabulary that still keeps craft at its core. She insists that everything she designs should carry a “touch of the hand,” a visible or tactile trace of human labor and artistry that resists fashion’s tendency to flatten and mass‑produce.
Scott is explicit in her critique of how many white male designers imagine women, arguing that they reduce female identity to narrow archetypes: sexy, proper, uptight or flashy, but rarely complex. She counters with her own vision of the 2026 New York woman as globally minded, precise but resistant to the tyranny of perfection, and full of private, unexpected passions, like a buttoned‑up professional who quietly fences in her spare time. Her Proenza silhouettes reflect this character: office‑ready but slightly off‑kilter, with raised waists to lengthen legs and knit skirt suits that read formal yet relaxed rather than stiff.
Personally, Scott rejects restrictive structures like corsets and gravitates toward designs that embed ease and play within polish. She favors bell‑bottom trousers with sailor‑style buttons that open to flash a bit of leg, dramatically pointy shoes or square‑toed pumps that comically mash up clownish exaggeration and career polish, and slim evening bags that are actually large enough to hold essentials but derive their glamour from texture rather than ornamentation. She wears her own work, as do her mother and her wife, embodying the idea that her clothes must function in real lives, not just on runways.
To understand the Proenza customer, Scott met a group of “V.I.C.s” at a December dinner, including a Pilates instructor, a retired lawyer, a writer and several art advisers, reinforcing the brand’s long‑standing connection to the art world. Rather than lean on art as mood‑board inspiration, she became interested in the women who make and curate it, name‑checking figures like painters Cecily Brown and Rita Ackermann and curator Samantha Ozer as muses. This focus on actual cultural producers, not abstract artworks, shapes a collection built around thinking, working women whose clothes must move seamlessly between studios, offices and openings.
Scott is also putting those women directly on the runway by casting figures such as psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster and writer Zoe Dubno alongside professional models. She is including the 50‑something Jamaican model Romae Gordon, recently coaxed out of retirement, to expand fashion’s narrow age norms and connect the show back to her Caribbean roots. In the audience, she expects a brainy, art‑world crowd—Studio Museum in Harlem director Thelma Golden, Cyberfeminism Index creator Mindy Seu, gallerist Bridget Donahue—mirroring the intellectual community she imagines wearing the clothes.
Ultimately, Scott wants to dress women who are powerful and put together without being self‑serious, women whose inner lives are as elaborate as their schedules. Through Proenza Schouler and Diotima, she is trying to rewrite not just how New York looks on the runway but how it understands the complexity of its own womanhood. The article frames her debut as a test of whether a Black, queer, disabled immigrant designer can redefine a major American house and, with it, the image of the New New York woman.
