With Diotima, Rachel Scott connects her roots with her professional experience as a contemporary designer, her love of craft and her lifelong desire to bring her work back to the Caribbean.
," thinking about the ways she can help decolonize Jamaican fashion and extend that work to its Caribbean neighbors. "For example, I'm working with an artist from St. Vincent for the third collection, which is exciting, to make these connections and be able to do this collaborative work," she says.
Diotima is a cumulation of Scott's professional experience up to this point, plus this long-held desire to build something that connects back to her home. "I didn't really have the form [this would take] — I think I was always searching for who I would be making clothes for. And I still don't know," she says. "That's part of the project: making something for someone that maybe I don't know yet or doesn't yet exist. I want to create this possibility.
"Now that I know them so much more intimately, what they're good at and what they like, I've been more open," Scott says. "I'm making new things within the framework of their capabilities, and they really like it.