When Rachel Scott was named designer of the year at last year’s Oscars of fashion, officially known as the Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards, it was one of those rare award-show surprises.
It was not because Ms. Scott, the founder of Diotima, didn’t deserve the honor, or because she beat out such established names as Tory Burch and Khaite, but because she had really been in business for only four years. She was new enough that just the year before, she won the award for emerging designer of the year. She was generally considered an insider’s secret.
Then, three weeks ago, she got another gold star when she was named creative director of Proenza Schouler, making her the rare woman to earn the top job at an established company — and the even rarer designer of color to do so. She is also one of only a handful of designers running two houses at the same time.
She was essentially being crowned New York’s Next Great Thing, and she hadn’t even had a runway show.
Well, on Monday she finally did. It may not have been one of those pivotal moments when you think, “Holy bugle beads, Batman, fashion will never be the same!” But it was still a shot of energy in what has been a mostly moribund week full of languid cream pantsuits signifying not much.
While the inspiration for the show was Carnival, the Caribbean celebration of resistance and selfhood (Ms. Scott is Jamaican American), the point was bigger than just a party.
Like many designers of her generation, Ms. Scott doesn’t shy away from politics — she dedicated her collection to “the honor of all displaced persons” — but rather than pontificate or polemicize, she uses her work to offer a different point of view, to show rather than tell. And what this particular collection showed was just how gorgeous the melting pot can be.
She did it by splicing the American sportswear tradition, as well as more recent streetwear references, with her own Jamaican craft tradition. So macramé mesh hoodies and sweatpants sparkling with beads at every interstice provided the base layer for cha-cha skirts made from layers of jersey petals, and long, sweeping sea captain’s coats were edged in shiny, barnacle-like encrustations.
Slick tailored pants came under tubular tunics that mixed fringe and frills so they looked almost like sheepskin. A three-piece suit was reimagined as a silky shirt inlaid with lace, with a matching crochet skirt tied over trousers. (Finally, a cool way to go back to the office.) A pair of minimalist finale dresses appeared to be composed of hundreds of tulle petals, the hems stuffed with fabric so they seemed to float ever so slightly in the breeze.
The result was familiar forms, suffused in an unfamiliar but easy-to-adopt grace.
If Diotima showcased Ms. Scott’s ability to infuse the personal into product, a presentation held earlier in the week for Proenza Schouler revealed her smarts. (She was only recently named creative director, but she has been consulting for the house since early this year and had worked on the collection with the existing design team.) A taster of sorts of what is to come, the collection melded her approach to texture with the more urbane Proenza approach to tailoring. Think jacquard jackets turned inside out to expose tuftlike threads and lacquered cotton laser cut into fluttery leaves.
That was promising, but even more so was the way Ms. Scott described how she distinguished between the brands. She said she was inspired by the Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck and the way he made two films on the same subject, one documentary and one fiction.
Embracing the idea of seeing one story from two different perspectives? What an idea.
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
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