Rachel Scott’s Diotima and Wifredo Lam: An artistic inheritance (2026)
Diotima autumn 2026. Photo: Giovanni Giannoni/WWD via Getty Images
The conversation continues into the present. For Diotima’s autumn/winter 2026 collection, designer Rachel Scott worked with the estate of Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, drawing on his distinctive visual language and works including Omi Obini (1943) and his Femme Cheval paintings. Lam’s fusion of Surrealist influences with Afro-Cuban cultural references offered Scott a rich vocabulary for exploring identity, history, and the Caribbean experience. Elements of the paintings were translated into garments, including an organza halter dress and maxi skirt, while a desaturated interpretation of Omi Obini appeared on a jacket and wrap skirt. Rather than treating the artwork as decoration, the collection engaged with the ideas and cultural consciousness embedded within it. The result reaffirmed that the most compelling relationship between art and fashion is one of interpretation, not imitation.
Fashion and art have never existed in isolation from one another. Artists have used clothing, celebrity and commercial imagery to question the culture around them, while designers have drawn on painting, sculpture, performance and installation to challenge what a garment can express. Sometimes the relationship begins with an image; at other times, it begins with a silhouette, a material or a way of seeing the body.
What endures is the exchange between the two. A painting acquires movement when translated into a dress. A garment becomes an idea when it challenges the body’s familiar proportions. And an artist’s visual language can take on a new life when it leaves the gallery and enters the world. In each other’s image, art and fashion find not simply a reflection, but another way to see.
