Rachel Scott was named the creative director of Proenza Schouler days before the brand’s New York Fashion Week presentation last September. Today’s show was her real opening salvo, though, the first collection she worked on start-to-finish having replaced brand founders Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, who decamped for Paris and the opportunity to helm Loewe. An impressive cohort of fellow designers including Maria Cornejo, Calvin Klein’s Veronica Leoni, and Raul Lopez of Luar turned up to support Scott, who has a show for her own label Diotima in just four days.
Juggling two brands, Scott may be New York Fashion Week’s busiest designer. It’s hardly any wonder she described this season’s Proenza Schouler woman as “deathly punctual and always on time—but today she was running late.” Explaining at a showroom preview how her vision differs from that of McCollough and Hernandez, she went on, “I always felt like there was this separation, like there was this glass between you and this woman that you’d see, and she was impeccable. She was super-perfect. And that idea of perfection is a little bit scary for me.”
That’s fair enough. McCollough and Hernandez were long part of New York fashion’s in crowd and their shows were always the place to be, the effect of which could be either enticing or alienating. Scott is plainly eager to open the tent. “I want to give her more texture and complexity and little peeks of eroticism, but it’s totally self authored,” she said.
As the first looks emerged the haphazard quality she spoke about wasn’t necessarily obvious. The show-opening sleeveless dress with a sculptural roundness in its skirt and the pair of neat midi-length skirt suits that followed were quite pulled together and polished. But little off-kilter details accumulated in the form of asymmetric lapels on an ivory coat, askew buttons that gave a long-sleeve dress its draped forgiving shape, and the darts left exposed on the outside of a vivid red evening sheath—perfectly imperfect. As for peeks of eroticism, those came via a bloom of pleats under the cutaway hip of a skirt or in the flash of skin left exposed by a ruffle-edged slit in trousers.
Scott’s expertise in crochet at Diotima is paying off at Proenza; there was a sweet novelty to a donegal knit double-breasted skirt suit with a flippy peplum in back, and a sensuality to a clingy ribbed knit polo dress. The earthier sensibility she was after came across most vividly in the orchid print pieces at the end. Scott cultivates orchids. Here, a photograph of the delicate flowers at night was hand-painted and then printed, “so you see the sloppy edges of the photograph,” at the hem of the dress. “I like this play between the hand and the digital at Proenza,” she said. Scott has made a quick study of what the brand has stood for up until now. As she puts down roots, she should be encouraged to let more of her own wild spirit in.
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