It was Scott’s time at Colgate, and in the United States in general, that opened her eyes to America’s relationship with race, and how the web of race informs, or even supersedes, everything from economics, politics, culture, class, religion, geography, ethnicity—even ambition.
“In Jamaica,” she says, “it’s not the same—there’s obviously class, there’s obviously colorism, but I did not understand what it was like to be a Black American until I moved here and went to Colgate.”
In the fall of 2001, before Scott’s freshman year, Colgate, with about 2,800 students, was caught in an uproar that, in some ways, presaged the arguments over diversity that continue to roil college campuses and the country itself today: A political science professor’s email questioning the intellectual rigor of students of color set off a series of protests—a controversy that continued into the next year, when Scott and the few other international students at the school were left to make some sense of it all—though Scott makes it clear that questioning her own worthiness wasn’t part of this examination.
“I grew up in a Black country, so it was normal to think that I could be in any space,” she says, though she’s quick to add: “I admit that there’s a level of privilege, because I’m a light-skinned Black person—my mother is white, and Jamaica is, unfortunately, colorist still. But I was very lucky to not think that I didn’t belong somewhere. I also think it’s part of being Jamaican,” she says with a laugh: “We think we do everything better than everybody.”
As an undergraduate, Scott took summer courses at Central Saint Martins; she studied abroad in Dijon. After graduation, having become enamored of the work of the Antwerp Six—the group of designers including Dries Van Noten, Walter Van Beirendonck, and Ann Demeulemeester that captured the imagination of the fashion industry in the late 1980s—she wanted to study fashion design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, but when she wasn’t accepted, she again looked to a plan B. She headed to Milan for a yearlong program at the Istituto Marangoni (which counts among its alumni Franco Moschino) and worked briefly at Costume National, but when her visa expired, she was off to London to look for a new post.
“I interviewed with Sarah Burton the year before McQueen passed away, and she was really lovely,” Scott says. “I interviewed with Phoebe [Philo] right when she was starting at Céline, and she said, ‘You have really nice sketches,’ and that was it—I didn’t get the jobs.” Scott finally landed back in New York City, where she worked at J. Mendel and, eventually, at Rachel Comey, where she stayed for seven years and rose to vice president of design.
“I appreciated her intelligence and thoughtfulness,” recalls Comey, whose company marks its 25th anniversary this year (see page 46). “I think about all different types of women—how’s their body changing; how is their career affecting their wardrobe?—and Rachel was up for that type of exploration.” That Scott would eventually leave to launch her own brand was not a surprise. “I knew she had it in her,” Comey says.