Photo: IK Aldama / Courtesy of Diotima
Photo: IK Aldama / Courtesy of Diotima
In the six years since, she has become New York City’s inarguable designer to watch. In September of last year, as an explicit confirmation of her talent and broad remit, Scott was named the creative director of Proenza Schouler, a label founded by Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez (who have relocated to Paris to helm Loewe) that emerged in the early 2000s and quickly became the go-to outfitter for some of New York’s most well-dressed women, including Mary-Kate Olsen, Ashley Olsen, Chloë Sevigny. Scott’s Diotima has come to occupy a similar space today, dressing the new generation of, albeit more diverse, fashion glitterati. She showed her first collection for Proenza Schouler on Wednesday, a terrific opening effort.
Much of Scott’s work at Diotima revolves around decolonization, be that by her centering of her home country of Jamaica or by considering elegance from a non-white, non-Eurocentric point of view, oftentimes with an emphasis on craft. This season, Scott partnered with the family and estate of the late Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam, whose work is currently the subject of its first US retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
A Cuban artist of African and Chinese descent, Lam would often refer to his art as an “act of decolonization.” His work expanded the context of modernist art into the realm of Black diasporic culture by way of transporting landscapes and living characters. He studied in Spain and developed his practice under a war-torn Europe, gaining the support of the likes of Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró. During the Spanish Civil War, he worked with the Republicans to create posters and propaganda, and later illustrated André Breton’s famous surrealist poem Fata Morgana.
Upon his return to Cuba in 1941, he became reacquainted with Afro-Cuban culture. His work developed in style as he merged European surrealism and cubism with Caribbean motifs. Above all, it continued to be political in spirit but this time with a singular focus, to reconnect Cuba with its African heritage. This is a tradition that Scott seeks to uphold by remarking on her own individual cultural lineage.