A few months ago, Diotima’s Rachel Scott put out a call to her community to send her photos of their grandmothers. “My work is very photo-based, I look at images of people and I think about that person, rather than the garments they’re wearing,” she said backstage at her presentation in downtown Manhattan. “Historically it’s so hard to find images of Black women or women from the Caribbean in general, and when you do find something, it’s very flattened. Women are usually portrayed as stoic or strong, and that’s it. There’s no nuance, there’s no complexity.”
Her work is a continuous attempt to rectify that, but the images she collected in the process did help narrow her scope for the season. “A lot of them showed the women in their home, so I began thinking about the domestic space,” she explained. At her presentation, models milled around a few different interiors-based tableaus—a dining room table set with handheld mirrors instead of plates, free-floating headboards, turn of the century chairs, and mirrors. Immediately captivating was the tailoring: a burgundy suit worn with a crystal mesh capelet, a black tailored jacket with an over-the-top butter yellow looped yarn collar that was a much groovier take on the standard shearling or fur versions (expertly paired over a butter yellow crochet dress and black trousers), a fitted vest with black macramé epaulettes. “It might be considered military, but I’m considering it anti-military,” Scott said. (It makes sense to convert these symbols of war through the use of handcrafts.) She also added a white cotton poplin blouse with a button-over collar into that classification. Worn underneath a fringed long sleeve black dress, it felt like a new direction for the designer, a little mod-ish and less carefree than her usual woman.
But Scott did not forget about the body; a series of sensual dresses in nylon jersey were draped directly on the body “rather than going through rounds of sketches,” opposing the so-called immediacy of their creation was a languid feeling, which was also there on a strapless knitted dress with rounded eyelet details that shaped in at the waist, and another in gray Harris Tweed. “I love this fabric, but I didn’t want to use it for tailoring,” she explained. “I wanted to peel away at what you’d expect of that fabric and do something that was more sensual and maybe more perverse.”
Season after season, it’s extraordinary to watch Scott expand and develop the universe of the Diotima woman. At times raw or precious, strict or soft, dressing from night to day to night again, Scott finds a new territory to stretch out into and bring the women she dresses along for the ride. It’s not surprising that she won the CFDA award for Womenswear Designer of the Year back in October, (and even less surprising is the amount of designers—male and female—that introduce themselves to her at events and immediately follow “Nice to meet you” with “I voted for you.”
