“It’s been really, really busy,” says Diotima founder and creative director Rachel Scott when we connect on Zoom in mid-April. She’s not kidding. Scott, the Kingston, Jamaica-born, New York-based designer of crochet and crystal mesh dresses that are quickly becoming a 2020s going-out uniform, is telling me where she’s been since we last saw each other at her New York Fashion Week presentation two months prior and it’s tiring just hearing her recount her travel schedule. “I went to Paris for appointments, Oakland for a store event, came home, got married, went to Kolkata to meet with artisans, and now I’m back in my studio starting on the next collection,” she says.
This whirlwind itinerary is par for the course for the 40-year-old creative. Scott took a leap of faith in 2021 by starting her own label and leaving her day job as VP of design at Rachel Comey the following year, and she hasn’t stopped moving since. “I think the moment I decided to change that one thing, everything in my life just unraveled and then rebuilt in a new and more interesting way,” she reflects. The past three years have been filled with highs and lows. Scott met her now wife, Chaday Emmanuel Scott, a Jamaican events producer; came out; and divorced her husband, all while trying to build a fledgling business. “I spent most of 2022 crying,” Scott says. Last year, things started looking up: She got engaged in the midst of Diotima racking up a slew of industry accolades including winning CFDA American Emerging Designer of the Year and being named a CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund runner-up and an LVMH Prize finalist.
“I think the moment I decided to change that one thing, everything in my life just unraveled and then rebuilt in a new and more interesting way.”
For the April wedding, both brides wore custom Diotima; Scott, a white crochet gown and Emmanuel Scott, a cream wool suit made from strips of fabric connected by decorative hand stitches. The looks centered Caribbean aesthetics and global artisanal craft, core tenants of Scott’s vision for the label. As a child, Scott loved the starched crochet doilies her relatives used to decorate their homes, and she used to climb mango trees and sit up in their branches for hours to embroider. In her years working for luxury brands in New York and Milan, she saw that in an industry that privileges handmade things, there wasn’t much attention paid to non-Western craft traditions, and she decided to do something about it. All of Diotima’s crochet is made by women’s collectives in Jamaica, and Scott also recently started working with an Indian embroidery atelier. “Crochet is very much the foundation and it’s threaded through the whole collection, but my interest has always just been craft and handmade and savoir-faire across cultures,” Scott says.
Sustainability is of paramount importance for Scott, who works with the highest grade materials like FSC-certified viscose, GOTS-certified cotton, and RWS-certified wool. “But for me, much more than that sustainability is just an approach to making in general: making sure that the artisans we work with are appropriately compensated because most of the clothes in the world are made in the global south, and these are the people that are at the forefront of climate change,” she says. Scott only designs two collections per year instead of four—Fall/Winter 2024 will start arriving in stores in June during the pre-fall window—and since it’s all lighter weight, it’s meant to be seasonless anyway.
Part of the magic of Diotima is the way designs thread the needle between sensual and cerebral. While best known for bare crochet, the label features oversize tailoring in equal measure. “I always like the sexy stuff with a bit of contrast,” Scott says. Diotima’s namesake is Diotima of Mantinea, a female philosopher in Plato’s Symposium who taught Socrates that love is beauty. It’s the kind of bookish reference adored by Scott, a Colgate University alum who double majored in art history and French and also did a fashion design intensive at Istituto Marangoni.
But while the Diotima woman is intellectual, she never takes herself too seriously; she’s as at ease in an art gallery as she is at an all-night street party. The Spring/Summer 2024 collection took cues from the work of the Jamaican sculptor Laura Facey, whose carved wood anatomical hearts explore the generational trauma of slavery in the Caribbean, and featured a collaboration with the artist on miniature versions worn as amulets. The Fall/Winter 2024 collection had a much lighter focus, following the day in the life of a woman that begins at 4 a.m. after a louche night twerking to dancehall, and follows her buttoning up into daytime looks kids on TikTok might call “office siren”— professional, with a bit of sex appeal. From her Zoom square I can see that Scott is wearing one such ensemble: a crisp cotton-poplin shirt with teardrop cutouts over a black bralette.
Scott loves scrolling through Instagram photos tagged with her handle @diotima.world to see how women style her designs IRL One wore a crystal mesh gown backwards with the scoop back barely grazing her breasts (“iconic”), while another layered a crochet top underneath a big white shirt (“really chic”). And then there’s a story she heard from the sta$ of the Webster in L.A. “Bianca Censori, was trying on a crochet dress and apparently Ye took a pair of scissors and cut the bottom off because he wanted it shorter,” she says. “I can’t wait to see my Ye ‘collab’—it was a mini dress to begin with!” While the looks don’t always strike the balance between sexy and serious that Scott envisioned, she’s cool with that. “I enjoy seeing the lives that these pieces go on to live,” Scott says. She should expect many more exciting tales.
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