Four days after presenting her first collection as creative director of Proenza Schouler, Rachel Scott returned to the runway for Diotima’s Autumn/Winter 2026 show. The proximity of the two moments was striking. If her Proenza debut marked a new chapter inside an American fashion institution, Diotima felt like a reaffirmation of her own authorship.
The collection centres on a collaboration with the estate of Wifredo Lam, an artist Scott first encountered roughly 15 years ago while reading the work of Aimé Césaire. Lam and Césaire met in Martinique during the Second World War and later collaborated on Césaire’s 1941 poem Annonciation. That intersection of Caribbean identity, Surrealism and anti-colonial politics left a lasting impression on Scott.
Years later, in Diotima’s founding year, she saw Lam’s 1944 painting The Eternal Presence (An Homage to Alejandro García Caturla) at the Surrealism Beyond Borders exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The connection resurfaced this season in the form of a formal partnership with the Lam estate. Members of the artist’s family travelled from Paris to attend the show, which coincides with Lam’s current exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.
Scott selected four paintings from Lam’s oeuvre, three of which are on view at MoMA. Among them is Omi Obini(1943), a work that reflects Lam’s spiritual and political homecoming to Cuba. Scott translated it into a gobelin jacquard used for a cape-collared jacket that closed the show. The tapestry technique created a grayscale image on the surface while revealing a dense layering of colour within the weave.
Works from Lam’s Femme-Cheval series provided the starting point for the opening look. The Afro-Cuban spiritual figure, associated with feminine power and resistance, appeared as hand-executed organza intarsia on a skirt and halter dress. A 1948 painting from the series was also digitally printed onto a silk-wool trumpet skirt and reinterpreted in a near-transparent wool knit. The effect was less reproduction than translation, with Scott isolating and abstracting details rather than replicating entire canvases.
Lam’s 1942–43 painting La Jungla informed the collection’s colour palette and botanical motifs. Sugar cane and heliconia, symbols embedded in the original work’s critique of colonial exploitation, surfaced in textile and surface design. The historical references were clear, but the garments remained grounded in Diotima’s codes: crochet, precise tailoring and a calibrated sensuality.
The political context was explicit. Scott described the collection as anti-imperialist, conceived during a period marked by immigration raids in the United States and renewed tensions across parts of the Caribbean. The clothing framed power as embodied rather than abstract. Several models carried equestrian-style whips, reinforcing the symbolism of the horse-woman figure that recurred throughout.
Production also reflected Diotima’s ongoing commitment to craft communities. In addition to the Jamaican artisans who contribute crochet to the brand each season, Scott collaborated with Refugee Atelier, a New York organisation that supports refugee women through employment and training. The emphasis on labour and authorship mirrored the themes embedded in Lam’s work.
This marks the third time Scott has integrated fine art into a Diotima collection, following collaborations with Jamaican sculptor Laura Facey and Vincentian photographer Nadia Huggins. The approach is consistent with her academic background in fine art, art history and French literature. At Diotima, those references are direct and personal.
Balancing two collections in one week could have diluted the message. Instead, the Diotima show felt focused. Scott’s expansion into a larger American house has not softened her point of view. If anything, Fall 2026 reinforced Diotima’s position as the space where she engages most directly with history, politics and the Caribbean modernist tradition that continues to shape her work.
