How Rachel Scott found meaning in fashion again

The designer discusses the journey to her new role at Proenza Schouler, starting her own brand, Diotima, and carrying her heritage into global fashion.

By Jorinde Croese

Rachel Scott’s appointment as creative director of Proenza Schouler took the industry by surprise. But that’s not to say it wasn’t hard-earned. Before stepping into the role, Scott had already built a formidable career inside major houses – J Mendel, Elizabeth and James and Rachel Comey – where she shaped collections, ran teams, and learned the machinery of big-brand design from the inside. In parallel, she began building Diotima, the label she launched in 2021, rooted in her Jamaican heritage and anchored by the handmade crochet techniques that have become its signature. Diotima’s rise has been fast, intuitive, and distinctly personal, reflecting Scott’s commitment to craft, community, and a slower, more deliberate way of making clothes.

Her new role at Proenza Schouler places her at the centre of an industry that has been painfully slow to recognise women, and especially Black women, as creative leaders of major luxury houses. Scott is one of the very few to reach this level without conforming to the narrow mould the industry still favours; she is one of the only Black women to hold such a position, alongside Grace Wales Bonner’s appointment at Hermès this year. The symbolic weight of that is not lost on her, even if she resists being cast as a “first”. As she prepares to unveil her first full collection for the brand next season, the expectations placed on her – culturally, structurally, and personally – are immense.

What makes Scott compelling is not only her ascent, but the perspective she brings: shaped by migration, precarity, craft traditions, and years of navigating institutions that were never built with someone like her in mind. Diotima grew out of an existential need for meaning. Proenza Schouler now asks her to apply that clarity of vision at scale. In this conversation, she reflects on the leap into independence, the realities of sacrifice, the politics of creative leadership, and the unlearning that allowed her to build a world on her own terms.

I don’t know if there would ever have been a path for me to grow into leading a team. And that is not only because I am Black. I think that is also true for women in Italy. There is such a rigid hierarchy, and growth is almost impossible.

At 1 Granary, we speak with so many senior designers and creative directors who tell us they would never start a brand at this stage of their career. People often launch labels straight out of school, when they are still somewhat naïve and full of energy. But once you have spent years inside big houses, you know exactly what it takes: the structure, the team, the product developers, the factories, the whole machinery. So what was your thought process in starting Diotima from the position you were in, with all that experience behind you?

I had been working about sixteen years at that point. And it was definitely an emotional crisis I went through during the pandemic, as many people did. I just could not find meaning in what I was doing anymore, day-to-day. Faced with everything happening, I felt I could not live without meaning. When you start out, you are idealistic. You work because you have an idea. By the end of it, I had lost that idea, or at least the everyday expression of it, even if the seed of it was still there. So it was almost like an emergency. I had to find meaning again, and this was the only way I could. And no, I was definitely not equipped to start a brand when I was fresh out of school, not financially and not logistically. I could not even stay in any of the fashion capitals without a job. But everything is a risk, so we might as well take the risk that means something. That is why I started it. It was really an existential crisis.