How Diotima Designer Rachel Scott Builds a ‘Sultry Haven’ for Women

Diotima designer Rachel Scott thought it was a mistake when she heard she was nominated for American Womenswear Designer of the Year at the 2024 CFDA Fashion Awards, which will be presented Monday night at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

“I screamed in the midst of an appointment because it was such a shock,” said Scott, 40, who is nominated alongside industry stalwarts Marc Jacobs, Tory Burch, Thom Browne and Proenza Schouler, after launching her brand just three years ago — and winning the CFDA’s Emerging Womenswear Designer award just last year.

“I can’t believe I’m in that group of people who I have so much respect for and have had so much respect for my entire career — and who have multimillion- slash billion-dollar businesses,” said the designer, who hails from Kingston, Jamaica.

It was no mistake.

Bootstrapping her business using $30,000 of personal savings, fashion prize and grant money, Scott has created one of the most exciting new women’s luxury brands to come out of New York in years. With her authentic, nuanced and inclusive vision of Caribbean style rooted in tailoring, sportswear and knit dressing with handcrafted details, fringe and embellishment, she’s achieved the combination of everyday and extraordinary that fashion can’t get enough of right now.

Her spring 2025 collection, shown in a movable presentation format, conjured Jamaican pocomania, prim-and-proper churchgoing and dance hall partying in a rush of sequins, fringe, palm frond embroideries and skin, and was universally praised as one of the best of the season across all cities, leading to pick up from additional retailers. She now has 25 accounts globally, including Bergdorf Goodman, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom and Net-a-porter. For spring, she has also broadened her range by offering her first denim, footwear and embellished bags.

“It’s been a great year and we’ve grown — orders are up 30 percent from last year and 25 percent from last season,” Scott said at her studio on the Lower East Side, where she is the only full-time employee, but six others help her as consultants and part-timers.

One only has to look at the number of shuttered brands in recent years to know the challenges of running an independent fashion label are real, especially with department stores and online retailers contracting and luxury spending slowing. Scott feels the pinch of cash flow issues on a daily basis, juggling production costs and payments for her business, which is currently 94 percent wholesale. But everyone is rooting for her.

Retail and Industry Support

“She is so well positioned to really seize this moment and go well into the future because she strikes the perfect balance between having emotional clothing that you are really inspired to buy because you don’t have anything like it in your closet exactly, but it’s also really practical and wearable. And the craft makes it feel like something that’s a worthy investment,” said April Hennig, who has worked with Diotima in her role as chief merchandising and marketing officer of Moda Operandi and founding board member of RaiseFashion, the nonprofit dedicated to offering advisory services to BIPOC brands.

Moda Operandi launched Diotima in 2022 with a trunk show and its business with the label has continued to grow, now grossing more than $300,000 in sales annually, with consistent full-price sell-throughs and a fall 2024 sell-through of more than 50 percent so far, Hennig said.

“It’s rare to find a designer at this stage who is both singular in her design vocabulary with a well-rounded range that merchandises beautifully on the floor,” said Yumi Shin, chief merchandising officer of Bergdorf Goodman, which started stocking Diotima for pre-spring 2023. “It’s clear to us that Rachel is well-equipped to build the Diotima brand and take it to the next level.”

In addition to retailers, celebrities and stylists have also embraced the brand, with Angel Reese rocking a red hot fringed crochet Diotima dress for the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show last week.

“I think for a while we were missing a modernized, female-led, sensuality across the fashion collections at large. Diotima offers a sultry haven for the modern woman, inclusive of all the intricate qualities that come along with that, be it the desire to be more androgynous, provocative or intellectual,” said Marika Ella-Ames, who styles the collection’s presentations, campaigns and look books, as well as creatively consulting for the brand. “Not to mention the fact that Diotima is also the first rising fashion house to come out of Jamaica, which is as historical as it is exciting. To see the anecdotes and nuances of Jamaica, its history and its culture, be so profoundly received throughout the industry is powerful.”

A Steady Rise

While her rise may seem rapid, it’s not as if Scott came out of nowhere.

She launched Diotima at age 37 after decades of experiences at a diverse group of brands, each one setting her up in some way for what she is becoming.

After graduating from Colgate University with degrees in fine art and French literature, she decided to go into fashion, taking courses at FIT in New York, Central Saint Martins in London and Istituto Marangoni in Milan. That led to a position at Costume National, where she learned about Italian tailoring and “crazy embellishments,” such as sequins applied on their ends to mimic the look of astrakhan, she said, still marveling over it now.

When her visa ran out, she interviewed with Phoebe Philo at Céline and Sarah Burton at Alexander McQueen, but didn’t have enough experience yet to fill the roles. So she returned home to her parents’ house in Jamaica feeling dejected, she said.

Shinae Lee, her best friend from Colgate University whom she met at age 17 on the first day of college, was working at Peter Som at the time. She bought Scott a plane ticket to New York and encouraged her to send her résumé around. “I told her to get out of Jamaica and out of her head,” said Lee, recalling how they bonded over fashion at the upstate New York university, and describing her friend as “worldly,” “always up to date culturally” and “able to have a conversation about anything.”

Even then, Scott would talk about wanting to have her own label, said Lee, who now runs operations for Diotima. “She always wanted to do something related to Jamaica, to amplify Jamaica’s voice through craft. Jamaica is a huge part of her, it’s what identifies her and where her heart belongs.”

Scott worked for a year at J. Mendel, where she relished the experience of being hands-on in a workroom, and then landed at Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen’s contemporary brand Elizabeth and James, which taught her about the commercial side. Then she joined Rachel Comey in 2015 as a senior designer, working her way up to vice president of design, footwear and ready-to-wear.

“[Rachel Comey] has a real care for her customer, and I’d never thought about the customer before her…she really thinks about where these people are going, what they’re doing in their lives,” Scott said.

When she felt ready to start her own label in 2021, it was her love for Jamaica that inspired her.

Contemporary Caribbean

“Growing up in Kingston is really special, because you’re in a city with all the means, but then my mother would be like, ‘let’s go find a waterfall,’” she said of the natural wonders of the island. She had a full childhood thanks to her parents — Noah, a furniture-maker, and Ruth, a flight attendant for Air Jamaica, who stoked her curiosity and wanderlust by taking her out of school and on trips, sitting her in the jump seat on the plane. Her mother now oversees Diotima’s craft partners in Jamaica.

As intellectual as she can be, anyone who has been seated near Scott at dinner can attest she also likes to have a good time.

“I have been partying since I was 13,” she said, adding that the first clothing she made as a teenager were barely there skirts to wear out dancing. “But then you have to speak proper when you’re with certain people — and it’s this properness that I find quite silly, but really interesting,” she said of the contradictions that make their way into the label named after Diotima of Mantinea, the female philosopher in Plato’s “Symposium,” who teaches him about love.

Although crochet is usually passed down from grandmothers, Scott learned it on her own later in life, first appreciating it at local craft stores and women’s cooperatives that sold the doilies seen “in every auntie’s house” as table decorations and toilet paper covers, as well as on G-string bathing suits and cover-ups for the tourist industry.

“They were two discrete worlds that would never meet,” she said of the proper auntie and tourist hedonist. “When I first started making clothes with the doilies, the women were like, ‘What are you doing?’ I took things from the domestic environment in the region…but then I starched them and distorted them, made the doily into a harness,” she said of her early creations that covered the body in overlapping crochet panels almost like sea creatures.

She was intentional about working in a neutral palette, not wanting to fall into the cliched notion of Jamaican fashion — Rastafarian black, green, red and gold — or to define her brand too much as resortwear.

“Not to criticize the brands that have referenced the Caribbean before — I think that because of them, there was space for someone like me and respect what they do — but those brands are very different than mine because they are British or they’re New Yorkers and their perspective is at a distance. I want to try and propose a new idea,” she said.

A Design Language

Crochet became an instant signature.

“[Rachel] is not the first designer to use crochet but she has put together a language where you say that’s Diotima…and she has a solid business head on her shoulders,” said Kay Hong, the former Proenza Schouler chief executive officer who has been mentoring Scott through the Vogue Fashion Fund.

Right away Scott realized there were limitations to what she could produce. “I think I had five women working with me at the time and it’s all made by hand,” she said. “I had to figure out a way to have this very important element of the brand identity throughout the collection, keeping in mind my resources. So I took a blazer I had in the first season, and said what if we add some crochet? I sliced the blazer in half and inserted crochet and that was when I started mixing them together. It was literally out of necessity. And that took off.”

She was noticed by the mainstream press almost right out of the gate, just as the first collection dropped. Influential Oakland, Calif., retailer Sherri McMullen brought on the brand during its second season.

“She truly celebrates the female spirit in her pieces. You feel that when you’re wearing them — and the essence of the Caribbean,” said McMullen, who cohosted a dinner with Ayesha Curry for Scott in March of this year.

Diotima has been a favorite on the fashion prize competition circuit, with Scott being named a finalist for the LVMH Prize and a runner up for the CFDA Vogue Fashion Fund in 2023, both of which added credibility and cash infusions to the business, she said.

And she has since expanded from crochet to other forms of craft on shirting, denim and other everyday wardrobing pieces, as well as sexy crystal mesh and macramé knits that highlight the body, all priced from $450 to $1,995. What’s not done in Jamaica is done in Kolkata. “Paillettes, beading, big studs, the broderie anglaise in the palm leaves, the faggoting stitch to connect seams…I think it’s so special that you can put a piece together with a decorative hand stitch,” she said of the details.

Channeling Culture

Scott has also envisioned her brand as a platform for contemporary Caribbean culture, art and activism. For pre-fall 2022, she used underwater photo prints by Nadia Huggins, an artist from St. Vincent whose practice is “an attempt to build a archive of the sea and land that is not a colonial archive,” Scott said. She photographed the collection on Jamaican stylist, model and trans activist Emani Edwards at the National Gallery of Jamaica as a subtle protest against the country’s discrimination toward gender nonconforming and LGBTQIA+ people.

For spring 2023, she was inspired by Jamaican contemporary artist Laura Facey, best known for the monumental sculpture Redemption Song, which serves as Jamaica’s national monument to the Emancipation from Slavery. Facey made a chalk drawing called “Seed,” which the designer turned into a caftan, and miniatures of her carved wooden human hearts to style with the collection.

Scott would like to collaborate on a film next, she said, mentioning the socio-realistic Third Cinema film movement of the 1960s and ’70s as a favorite genre, and Mati Diop and Raoul Peck as two of her top filmmakers.

“I don’t foresee us doing runway just yet…so it’s exciting to think about other ways to do the presentation format,” she said.

Next year, she’s committed to building out the direct-to-consumer side of her business so she is not so reliant on the wholesale model.

“There’s no other way to get past this constant cash flow issue,” she said. “So we started investing. We just had our first e-commerce shoots, which I haven’t done because it’s expensive, but we also need the stock to support it,” Scott said. “I think I can bring back a crochet piece from three years ago, because people keep asking me for that and the website is the perfect place to have it. And I’m working on other forms of grants, and then going to start looking into Small Business Administration loans because we have to, that’s going to be what we’ll do to make the turn.”

“She’s up for it…she’s been working up to this her whole career,” said Lee, her operations manager.

As for the CFDA Awards on Monday night? “I don’t feel any pressure. Just being nominated is a huge accomplishment,” Scott said, adding that this year she will come prepared with a speech in hand, however. “I’m just going to have a good time.”