You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Want to add more newsletters?
Daily (Mon-Sun)
Daily Digest
Sign up for global news and reviews, a Wallpaper* take on architecture, design, art & culture, fashion & beauty, travel, tech, watches & jewellery and more.
Monthly, coming soon
The Rundown
A design-minded take on the world of style from Wallpaper* fashion features editor Jack Moss, from global runway shows to insider news and emerging trends.
Monthly, coming soon
The Design File
A closer look at the people and places shaping design, from inspiring interiors to exceptional products, in an expert edit by Wallpaper* global design director Hugo Macdonald.
Diotima founder and designer Rachel Scott first discovered the paintings of Afro-Chinese Cuban painter Wifredo Lam about 15 years ago. She was reading a lot of work by the Afro-Martiniquan French Surrealist poet Aimé Césaire. Lam met Césaire while imprisoned by the Vichy authorities in Martinique. The two would eventually collaborate, most notably on Césaire’s 1941 poem Annonciation, for which Lam drew an illustration. ‘It always had an impact on me,’ said Scott. ‘I felt very closely tied to it.” Then, in the first year of founding her New York-based fashion label Diotima, Scott saw his 1944 painting The Eternal Presence (An Homage to Alejandro García Caturla) La Présence éternelle at the Surrealism Beyond Borders exhibition at The Met. ‘It really spoke to me.’
When we spoke, Scott had just met the family of the late Cuban painter, who flew in from Paris to see three paintings by Lam imbued within Diotima’s A/W 2026 collection, shown on Sunday as part of New York Fashion Week. Coincidentally, the artist, who passed away in 1982, also has a current exhibition in New York at MoMA until April 11. Scott, who just showed her debut collection as creative director of Proenza Schouler on February 11, went straight to work on Diotima. Luckily, her Diotima studio and the Proenza Schouler office are within three blocks of each other. ‘I am very determined,’ she mused.
At Diotima, Rachel Scott collaborates with the Wifredo Lam estate
Wifredo Lam in Havana in 1942
There are several parallels between Scott and Lam. Both were born and raised in the Caribbean, Lam in Cuba and Scott in Jamaica. ‘Obviously, there's a shared cultural and ancestral connection, but also, the work is incredible. It's anti-imperialist. It exists as something Caribbean, but then as something global,’ she said. They also both decamped to Europe to expand their creative practices. Lam studied painting in Madrid before going to Paris, eventually returning to the Caribbean in 1941 as World War II ravaged Europe. Scott left for Milan to study fashion design at Istituto Marangoni Milano, followed by stints at Costume National, J. Mendel, and Elizabeth and James. ‘He went back to Europe, and spent his time between Paris and Albissola [Marina], which is in the north of Italy, on the coast, and I lived in Milan, which is in the north. He spent a lot of time in Milan,’ recalls Scott. ‘So yeah, there is that connection.’
Just as Lam likened his paintings to ‘a Trojan horse that would spew forth hallucinating figures with the power to surprise, to disturb the dreams of the exploiter,’ in a 1976 interview with Max-Pol Fouchet, Scott sees this collection as her own Trojan horse. Embedded within the Diotima A/W 2026 collection is an anti-authoritarian political statement veiled by the beauty of the garments. ‘It felt like this moment of urgency, because we are in an incredibly terrifying moment politically in America with the ICE raids, but also in the Caribbean, with what's happening in Venezuela, and again, renewed pressure on Cuba,‘ said Scott. ‘Absolutely, this is a political collection.’ The woman she imagines wearing it? ‘Powerful women. We need to feel the power, and luckily, we have some very powerful women who have been coming into the studio,’ said the designer. The show was indeed political and filled with powerful women; New York’s first lady Rama Dwaji sat front row next to her stylist, Gabriella Karefa-Johnson.
A skirt featuring an interpretation of Wifredo Lam’s 1943 work Omi Obini
Scott selected four paintings from Lam’s oeuvre, three of which are on view in the MoMA exhibition. There’s the 1943 Omi Obini a colourful, transcendent painting representing his personal, political, and spiritual homecoming through a figure believed to be Oshún, the Yoruba goddess of love, beauty, fertility, and fresh water. The other two are from Lam’s Femme-Cheval (Horse-Woman) series, depicting an Afro-Cuban spiritual image of an orisha (female deity) riding a devotee embodied by a horse, symbolising feminine power. ‘She’s super, super powerful. It's also erotic. It’s this very strong feminine power. She's also anti-imperialist. She's anti-colonialist,’ said Scott, before going into the symbolism Lam inserted into his paintings. ‘There is the sugar cane, and the Heliconia, but it's also a knife. She's very severe, very strong. It's the woman that we're always thinking about with the brand.’ There’s also Lam’s 1942-1943 masterpiece, La Jungla, an anti-colonial manifesto against the exploitation of the Cuban landscape, from which she pulled its rich colour palette.
‘It felt like this moment of urgency, because we are in an incredibly terrifying moment politically. Absolutely this is a political collection’
Rachel Scott
Scott translated the paintings into her own vision for eight looks in the collection, elegantly zooming in on the details for an abstract effect. A 1948 Femme-Cheval painting was intricately replicated by hand through organza intarsia on a skirt and halter dress that opened the show, while also digitally printed on a silk-wool trumpet skirt (‘the model who's wearing it is this incredible trans model. Their name is Lou. They came and saw the tag on there, and Lou is Wifredo’s last wife’s name,’ said Scott). Then there’s a 1950 Femme-Cheval painting, transformed into a clingy wool knit intarsia woven in a gauge so fine that it’s almost transparent. ‘It's like this transposing of the art of the body on the body,’ explained Scott. Meanwhile the designer turned Omi Obini into a gobelin jacquard, used in a cape-collared jacket for the finale.
Wifredo Lam Femme-Cheval (1948)
‘It's a jacquard that uses a very traditional heritage type of tapestry technique,’ said Scott. ‘You can see the artwork on the face is like this grayscale, then on the inside you see all of the layers of the colours; there are multiple threads in there.’ Several of the women showed they were ready for battle with equestrian-inspired whips in hand. In addition to the women in Jamaica who regularly contribute their crochet skills to Diotima, Scott also hired women from Refugee Atelier. ‘It's an organisation here in New York that works with women refugees who are trying to get their footing here in New York,’ she said.
This collaboration with the Wifredo Lam Estate marks the third time Scott, who studied fine art and art history and French literature at Colgate University, has incorporated artwork into a Diotima collection. For Diotima’s A/W 2024 collection, which also marked its first presentation, Scott collaborated with the Jamaican artist Laura Facey. A few seasons before that, Pre-Fall 2022, Scott worked with Nadia Huggins, a photographer from St. Vincent who specialises in underwater photography.
Wifredo Lam’s Femme-Cheval series both featured in, and inspired, the collection
Scott has learned some things about working on two collections for two distinctly different brands this season. ‘I've figured out where these things come from,’ she revealed. ‘With Diotima, it's very visceral and emotional and political and poetic, but there's so much more. I love film and I love philosophy, and with Proenza Schouler, it's more cerebral.’ Her plans after New York Fashion Week? ‘I'm not leaving my bed,’ she teased.
Catch up with our best shows of New York Fashion Week here.