Rachel Scott’s Proenza Schouler presentation kicks off a month of debuts in an industry at an inflection point. The Diotima founder was named creative director at Proenza last week: its own founders Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez decamped for Loewe in Paris earlier this year. McCollough and Hernandez always drew a crowd, and Scott had her own strong contingent of hometown supporters for a cheering squad this morning.
A crocheted-in-Jamaica Diotima top or dress or little scarf wrapped around the waist has become a badge of cool over the last couple of years, an insider code conveying a message that its wearer values small makers and independent brands, and knows what’s chic. Naturally, Scott brought some of that hands-on feel to this Proenza Schouler outing, though her first full collection won’t come until 2026.
“This is really a collaboration with the team: getting to know the language of the brand and silhouette and color, but then starting to inject a little bit of my point of view,” she said. “There are a lot more texture than you would normally see. Some of the textiles, I was thinking about this idea of the memory of them.” A yellow chrysanthemum motif on a seaglass green background looked like it was bleeding or weeping, Scott described it as “seen through glass.” She laser-cut coated cotton into florets to suggest an “echo” of a print, and she used the inverse side of an ivory floral jacquard so the “floats,” or the little snips of fabric, were exposed. The jacket she made out of the jacquard is the kind of piece you want to get up close to and caress.
As a female designer, Scott understands the intimacy a woman develops with her favorite clothes, and it will be fascinating to watch her imbue Proenza with a more feminine point of view. Intimacy doesn’t mean softness, though; Scott isn’t known for her tailoring but she professes a deep affection for it. That ivory inverse jacquard jacket was based on a block that McCollough and Hernandez used for years, but Scott experimented with the proportions. “There’s a bit of a length play. With this skirt, it feels a bit exaggerated and new,” she said.
On other jackets she added darts in back—again, exposing them instead of hiding them—so that the silhouette was quite sculpted and waisted. “Everything’s kind of inside out, trying to learn what they made.”
The highlights for this observer—who felt about Proenza Schouler the way people a generation younger feel about Scott today (a little possessive, a lot proud that designers in my cohort were making it), were a pair of subtly sensational dresses, with soft draping that lent them an uncomplicated allure. This may have been mere “prelude,” and negotiating the differences between two separate brands is never easy, but those dresses confirmed that Scott has a firm grasp on what fashionable women want.
