It’s a Monday afternoon in January, and designer Rachel Scott sits in her eighth-floor office at the Proenza Schouler headquarters on lower Broadway in New York. She’s only about five months into her history-making position as creative director of the brand—the first Black woman to be appointed to such a role at an established fashion house. The space, spread over two floors, is expansive: Employees’ dogs roam freely, as some 80 people go about making the company hum.
In the optimistic balancing act that Scott has crafted for herself, today’s location would seem to dictate that she be focused solely on Proenza Schouler—on moving its legacy forward while ensuring that its future also represents her long-standing interest in craft, narrative, and belonging. But of course, things rarely go according to plan: She’s on the telephone with her super at the Canal Street building that houses Diotima, the womenswear brand she founded in 2021 in the midst of the pandemic and in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. “I didn’t have the money to really start it, but I had a tiny, tiny bit of savings—I was going to buy a piece of land in Jamaica,” she says. “But then I was like, Well, maybe in 10 years I can make the money back.”
To understand all that Scott brings to Proenza Schouler, you have to understand Diotima. It is her protest, her activism, and her autobiography. Diotima celebrates the beauty of Jamaica—where Scott was born and grew up—as far more than sunny beaches and a melodic patois. In particular, Diotima highlights the artistry of hand-stitched crochet that women on the island produce in their homes and small shops. Their expertise in the delicate, meditative work represents generations of knowledge, and Scott allows them to express their individuality in patterns and shapes. While the fashion industry has long embraced poetic narratives about Europe’s lace makers and tailors, Scott is crafting a case for the poetry of Jamaica—and in doing so, she’s also protesting the historical flattening of Black culture into a monolith instead of a story defined by nuance, breadth, and individuality.
“Diotima is belowground work,” she says. “Aboveground, you’re on the streets; you’re very visible. Belowground, you’re not. Obviously, I’m not doing any kind of crazy political organizing out of the studio,” she continues, “but I think the message you put out into the world in a not-obviously-political sphere is just as important.”
But right now, in the Diotima showroom just a few blocks away from where we sit, the heat is on the fritz. “It’s freezing in there,” Scott tells her super over the phone—though she herself looks quite cozy in a black knitted skirt and sweater, with her long, wavy dark hair draped over one shoulder. While Diotima may no longer be a one-woman company run out of her home in Crown Heights, as it once was, the label remains tiny, with just a handful of employees—a break-even project, she says, which, for a fashion company that’s barely five years old, counts as a near miracle.
“I feel like I know him very well,” says Scott, laughing. “He’s very Jamaican.”
This fact of birth has helped shape Scott’s point of view, and even her career path, as Jamaica’s professional limitations propelled her around the world, a creative nomad seeking educational opportunities in the arts. The country’s history of colonialism has also been an impetus in her desire for ownership, independence, and stability, even as its majority-Black society has given her the confidence to believe that she belongs wherever she chooses to be.
Her work “resonates very much within the realm of the artists I’ve had the privilege to work with,” says Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Golden was drawn to Scott’s “ability to think about culture and craft, [and] the way she defined the space of her making through geography and technique.” She adds, “[Scott] has spoken so specifically about her craftsmanship and what it means for her to be working with artisans in Jamaica.”
Golden discovered Scott’s garments on the recommendation of artist Simone Leigh, an enthusiast from Diotima’s earliest days who saw herself in Scott’s work. “I was raised on the South Side of Chicago, but both of my parents are Jamaican—and I’m a preacher’s daughter,” Leigh says. “Over the course of my life, I’ve been privy to some of the louder, more obvious aspects of Jamaican culture that other people identify with, like reggae and dancehall, but Rachel also speaks to some of the other not-as-obvious traditions in that culture, like the lace and the doily work, and fabrics like white piqué, and things that I would associate with church.”
Scott’s Jamaican heritage also helps when the boiler needs repairing.
Unlike their European counterparts, American brands don’t have a great history of thriving after the death or departure of a founder. (Oscar de la Renta may be Seventh Avenue’s most obvious exception, Halston its most heartbreaking disappointment.) But now that Proenza Schouler’s founders, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, have decamped to Paris and Loewe, Scott is charged with improving that track record. Her first full collectsion for the label confirmed her abiding interest in textiles, which were mostly sculptural yet soft. They hinted at a future in which Proenza Schouler’s hallmark is clothes that cocoon their wearer while also telegraphing power and confidence.
McCollough and Hernandez established their brand, named after their mothers, in 2002, just after receiving their degrees from Parsons School of Design. Proenza’s launch and success became the aspirational playbook for a generation of graduates who aimed to become fashion entrepreneurs before the ink on their diploma was dry.
Scott, 42, took a different path. When she left Kingston for college, it wasn’t for design school. “I knew I wanted to do fashion,” she says, “but I didn’t want to just study fashion—I wanted to study languages and literature and philosophy and all of these things.”
Her dream was to enroll at New York University. Urgently. Desperately. And while she was accepted, without financial aid it proved impossible, so she headed off to Colgate, a liberal arts institution in a rural community in central New York State, where she’d won a scholarship. Arriving there, she was immediately struck by the wealth and privilege that seemed to surround her—students with Roman numerals after their name; students who used summer as a verb. She found the atmosphere on campus to be conservative, and the surroundings isolating. There was so much snow. And there were only a handful of international students.
But Scott had at least one thing in common with her classmates: Because her mother worked as a flight attendant for Air Jamaica, she was well-traveled. In the freewheeling days before the security hurdles instituted after September 11, she and her older brother, Matthew, would often sit in the jump seats of a plane and accompany their mother around the world. Her family was also creative: Her father was a furniture designer, and when her mother’s work route took her to places such as Thailand and Brazil, she’d visit local garment districts hunting for wholesale clothing to stock a boutique she ran back at home. As Scott grew older, if she couldn’t make the trip, she’d ask her mother to bring back some favors—not fabric with which to craft her own creations, but newspapers in other languages.
It was Scott’s time at Colgate, and in the United States in general, that opened her eyes to America’s relationship with race, and how the web of race informs, or even supersedes, everything from economics, politics, culture, class, religion, geography, ethnicity—even ambition.
“In Jamaica,” she says, “it’s not the same—there’s obviously class, there’s obviously colorism, but I did not understand what it was like to be a Black American until I moved here and went to Colgate.”
In the fall of 2001, before Scott’s freshman year, Colgate, with about 2,800 students, was caught in an uproar that, in some ways, presaged the arguments over diversity that continue to roil college campuses and the country itself today: A political science professor’s email questioning the intellectual rigor of students of color set off a series of protests—a controversy that continued into the next year, when Scott and the few other international students at the school were left to make some sense of it all—though Scott makes it clear that questioning her own worthiness wasn’t part of this examination.
“I grew up in a Black country, so it was normal to think that I could be in any space,” she says, though she’s quick to add: “I admit that there’s a level of privilege, because I’m a light-skinned Black person—my mother is white, and Jamaica is, unfortunately, colorist still. But I was very lucky to not think that I didn’t belong somewhere. I also think it’s part of being Jamaican,” she says with a laugh: “We think we do everything better than everybody.”
As an undergraduate, Scott took summer courses at Central Saint Martins; she studied abroad in Dijon. After graduation, having become enamored of the work of the Antwerp Six—the group of designers including Dries Van Noten, Walter Van Beirendonck, and Ann Demeulemeester that captured the imagination of the fashion industry in the late 1980s—she wanted to study fashion design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, but when she wasn’t accepted, she again looked to a plan B. She headed to Milan for a yearlong program at the Istituto Marangoni (which counts among its alumni Franco Moschino) and worked briefly at Costume National, but when her visa expired, she was off to London to look for a new post.
“I interviewed with Sarah Burton the year before McQueen passed away, and she was really lovely,” Scott says. “I interviewed with Phoebe [Philo] right when she was starting at Céline, and she said, ‘You have really nice sketches,’ and that was it—I didn’t get the jobs.” Scott finally landed back in New York City, where she worked at J. Mendel and, eventually, at Rachel Comey, where she stayed for seven years and rose to vice president of design.
“I appreciated her intelligence and thoughtfulness,” recalls Comey, whose company marks its 25th anniversary this year (see page 46). “I think about all different types of women—how’s their body changing; how is their career affecting their wardrobe?—and Rachel was up for that type of exploration.” That Scott would eventually leave to launch her own brand was not a surprise. “I knew she had it in her,” Comey says.
Scott takes people at their word. So when Kay Hong, the previous chief executive of Proenza Schouler, asked her if she would be interested in working for the brand as a consultant while their new management team searched for a design lead, Scott insists she thought of it only as a pleasant project—an opportunity to add a bit of runway sizzle to a brand in creative limbo—and nothing more. (When Scott was recognized as a runner-up in the 2023 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, Hong had become Scott’s business mentor, and after that formal mentorship ended the two stayed in touch.)
The consultancy went well; personalities clicked—and soon Scott was having her first-ever conversation about taking on the creative-director role at a marquee label. But before she could commit, she needed to talk to her wife, Chaday Emmanuel Scott. Emmanuel Scott, who is also Jamaican, does “aboveground” activism in support of the transgender community. They met about five years ago at a fundraising dinner Emmanuel Scott was hosting. Scott, who was married to a man, was invited by a mutual friend.
“Before I even saw her, I heard her voice, and my heart started racing,” Scott says. “And then we sat down at a long table—she was in the middle and I was at the end—and we kept locking eyes. I really didn’t know what was happening, but I basically got drunk and then got all flirty. Nothing happened,” she continues, “but then we ended up staying in touch. And then I had an affair.”
Emmanuel Scott proposed in Grand Cayman; they married in 2024 at City Hall in Manhattan, and they now live in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. With Scott working seven days a week, Emmanuel Scott does the cooking—typically Jamaican food. They love to play dominoes, and they love the beach. (Scott calls herself a “total mermaid. I’m meant to be in the water.”) And they’re teaching good manners to their young cockapoo (named Romeo Gigli, after the Italian fashion designer who is one of Rachel’s heroes) so he can join the other office dogs at Proenza Schouler.
“My whole life kind of fell apart and was rebuilt in a really beautiful way,” Scott says. “Someone said something to me this week that was probably the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about my work: They said that what I do here looks very free.”
Scott knew that taking on a second full-time design job would be all-consuming—and that, if she wasn’t careful, it could take a toll on her health, which requires particular vigilance due to a genetic condition called Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease. “It’s a degenerative neuromuscular condition, so if I don’t use the muscles, I’m going to lose them forever,” she says. (At the moment, the most noticeable manifestation is in her balance, which can be precarious.) But she couldn’t say no to Proenza Schouler.
Now she sits at her desk staring at the digital calendar on her computer—a large screen of blue and brown rectangles indicating meetings and design sessions, the former representing Proenza Schouler, the latter Diotima. The office, with its high ceiling and beautifully aged floors, has large windows that offer a bird’s-eye view of the sky and the neighborhood rooftops. (Over at Diotima, meanwhile, the steep central staircase induces vertigo, and a bit of construction board has been strategically placed in the showroom’s bathroom window to afford the staff a bit of privacy from the surrounding buildings, which are barely a parkour leap away.) The books in the Proenza offices are left over from the Jack and Lazaro era, and the fashion award on a shelf above Scott’s desk is as well. An ivory-colored sofa nearby holds four iterations of the PS1 crossbody bag, an early financial boon to the label that Scott thinks is due for a reconsideration.
Her vision for Proenza Schouler’s future begins by examining its past. As she spent time exploring the brand’s archive, she found particular inspiration in the founders’ earliest work, with its emphasis on construction and the inventive bra-style bodices and their Paris collectsions of 2017 and 2018, which spoke with a feminine softness. Along the way, she has discovered distinct differences in how she and her predecessors work. “They didn’t look at materials before they went into [the design] process, whereas I have to start with materials,” she says. “Maybe it’s a function of the limitations I’ve had—if the material doesn’t work, then I have to figure out what the material wants to do.”
Scott is now defining the space between two brands, between limitations and abundance, between documentary and fiction. “With Diotima, things are really often quite raw and a little bit decrepit almost—there is this undoneness to it,” she says. Proenza Schouler, meanwhile, has always been cleaned up and polished. “This idea of the uptown-downtown—I’ve been trying to make sense of what that means in 2026. It’s not so straightforward. Who is this woman? She’s quite proper, but I don’t know anyone that’s perfect. Maybe there are some cracks somehow.”
It might surprise some to know that designers—echoing what has happened with so many tactile, human-facing professions—spend a great deal of time in front of a computer. In any case, Scott is particularly pleased that one of those chunks of blue on today’s schedule indicates a meeting regarding shoes. Daniele Michetti, her footwear design consultant, arrives with four whiteboards the size of garage doors, each one covered in images of shoes—kitten heels, slides, loafers. The conversation pings between musings about materials—leather, or suede, or perhaps something with texture...python? And what about heel height? Proenza Schouler doesn’t sell a lot of high heels, Scott notes, but maybe it’s worth giving a pair a try?
It’s quite something to see a designer break through the cultural cacophony, or society’s stubborn desire for more of the same. But Scott’s work has been turning up on the red carpet more and more, most recently as worn by Ruth Negga, Greta Lee, and Tessa Thompson, with the latter in an exuberant fuchsia Diotima dress with an explosion of fabric petals when the Critics Choice Association honored her at its celebration of Black cinema and television in December.
The drumroll honors began in earnest in 2023, when the Council of Fashion Designers of America declared Scott the emerging designer of the year and recognized her as a CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund runner-up, all within months of her being named a finalist for the LVMH Prize. After more than a decade working behind the scenes in the industry, Scott was shot out of a cannon and into the spotlight.
The very next year, she won the CFDA award for womenswear designer of the year—the first time the prize had gone to a Black woman. Though Scott was nominated alongside Marc Jacobs, Tory Burch, Thom Browne, and Proenza Schouler’s McCollough and Hernandez, she had yet to show Diotima on the runway—something that wouldn’t come until the fall of 2025.
“I was really stunned,” says model and activist Bethann Hardison, 83, who was in the audience that evening. “I knew she was good, and that she was one of those people who deserve to be there. I just thought of who she was up against,” continues Hardison, who has long advocated for greater diversity in fashion. “I’m still learning about her, [and] I’m like, What? Huh? Rachel’s quietly, diligently moving right along. She’s not overly splashy. She didn’t even have a runway show until [practically] yesterday.”
That Scott made CFDA history says a great deal about the challenges women—and Black women in particular—face in the fashion industry. While men are generally afforded more space to be so-called creative geniuses, women are often expected to take a more pragmatic approach when designing for their peers. Flights of fancy are often held against them as indulgent or out of touch. Black women, of course, wrestle with those same prejudices—when they are not altogether overlooked.
While Scott finds it unfair that women designers seem to be reduced to “solving problems,” she also recognizes an inherent advantage. “I have access to a very intimate understanding of what something feels like on the body—especially as a woman that’s not a sample size,” she says. “How I feel about my hips, and my waist, and my arms, and my neck—what I show, what I don’t show—I have a real understanding of this.”
She’s also come to understand a lot about her adopted country. (Scott became an American citizen in 2020.) The night Scott won womenswear designer of the year, she wasn’t aware of the historical significance, but the next morning, when she came to realize that she stood on the shoulders of history’s unsung Black female designers, “I was like, Hold on a second….”
These days, Scott exudes calm in the face of a relentless 24/7 schedule. She clip-clops around the Proenza Schouler offices at a steady pace, the heels of her black boots announcing her arrival from afar. She maintains good humor in the midst of miscommunications, but she also speaks her mind—making it clear when she is displeased, when a meeting needs to move faster, when a problem needs to be talked through over a glass of wine.
With Diotima, she has been focused on telling her own story—one of family, and of place. Now she’s entrusted with a narrative that isn’t as personal—not yet, at least. “I think beauty, creating beauty, is important.” Her edition of Proenza Schouler begins with confidence.
In this story: hair, Melleisa Dawkins; makeup, Tonisha Kong.