The creative bonds between fashion designers and architects are well documented: Zaha Hadid and Karl Lagerfeld famously kept each other’s counsel, as do Miuccia Prada and Rem Koolhaas. Perhaps these bonds last because the two worlds have so much in common: They blend fantasy and utility, and yield work that must capture the imagination while conforming to what life requires of us. But above all, practitioners of the two disciplines are students of the body—intimately aware of how the drape of a garment makes a person larger than life, or how a building’s sweeping facade dwarfs them.
Rachel Scott and Raul Lopez understand this remit better than most. Both designers treat garments not simply as clothes but as structures—striking a delicate balance of proportions, materials, and tension between body and space. In her roles as the founder of Diotima and creative director of Proenza Schouler, Scott marries sleek tailoring with the artisanal traditions of Jamaican crochet, while Lopez’s Luar (his first name spelled backward) has become known for sculptural silhouettes and rigorous construction that borrow as much from the language of buildings as from his sartorial peers.
Ahead of a busy fashion week, the duo met with CULTURED’s Architecture Editor in the offices at NEW INC to chat about space, place, and their common disinterest in sketching.
Let’s kick off with a warm up question, what kind of toys did you play with growing up?
Rachel Scott: I had three Barbies. I wasn’t allowed to get a Ken doll, so I cut the hair off of one of them and made a butch lesbian doll! I didn’t have Nintendo or games so my energies went into building my Barbie house using Kleenex boxes. My dad was a furniture designer. He’d bring home fabric swatches and I’d turn them into the doll’s bed sheets. My mom bought me arts and crafts books and I spent many days outside and embroidered in the mango tree. That’s what I did for fun.
It sounds like what you did for fun is what you do for a living now.
Raul Lopez: My sister had the Barbies and I had the He-Man. So I would cut Barbie’s hair and put it on him. I would wait for my sister to go to school and as the youngest, I stayed at home and played with her Barbies, making homes out of cardboard. My favorite furniture piece was that white plastic thing you would get in the big pizza pies.
Lopez and Scott, in unison: Oh my God. That was a table!
Lopez: The table kept the box from collapsing onto the pizza. And then I’d drape the table and cut napkins. I also made mud pies. That was my thing.
These youthful experiments working with found objects and creating scenes—context seemed to be an important driver for both of you.
Lopez: The queer girls going crazy from the Caribbean! My dad was a property developer and I grew up on building sites. His work of creating infrastructures and structures plays so much into my world. My mom was a seamstress, which represents the soft side.
Scott: My father was a furniture designer who made custom kitchens. He dropped out of engineering school and became a project manager.
Lopez: My dad was an engineer too!
Scott: This is crazy. My mom was not a seamstress, but she had a clothing store and she was a flight attendant. I admired my dad because he made things and I wanted to be an interior designer. I was obsessed with spaces and manipulating materials. He worked with interior designers and architects and I interned for many of them. I was originally resistant to fashion or clothing.
My interest in fashion came about when I had nothing to wear to attend parties. A culture of going to the mall and shopping didn’t exist and I’d have to make my own stuff.
Lopez: Obviously, we are sisters; there is so much overlap. Clothing is a kind of structure that you wear. But with a property, once there’s a soul walking through a house, it starts to be worn. Since I was 11, I wanted to make clothes so I would stand out. Watching my mother take a pillowcase, a flat piece of nothing, to create something wearable, that was a wow for me.
The architect’s process is quite similar to the fashion designer’s. I spend a lot of time with architects and there is a fixation with the sketch, which gets formalized into drawings and models. Then a team of consultants and contractors realize a project. The big difference is time—it will take six years for an architect to realize the work, while it takes a fashion designer six months to deliver a collection. How important is the sketch? And what is your relationship to time?
Scott: I actually don’t like sketching.
Lopez: Me neither. I hate it. I love a drape. We need to drape, it comes from necessity. And we are people-watchers; we watch how people move in a garment and how they assemble an outfit.
Scott: I’m passionate about materials, how it feels in your hands, how it moves on the body. There’s an intimacy between the fabric and the person wearing it.
Lopez: The sketch is a fantasy!
Scott: A total fantasy! I’d rather experience what the material wants to do and what that means in the context of that person and their life. A sketch is a communication tool. A beautiful sketch does not equate to a beautiful garment.
Lopez: A lot of the kids who come work for me show me a sketch and I have to ask them: “Okay, so how do you get in? How do you get out? Where’s the zipper? The sketch is like a cartoon, you can draw whatever you want but is it reality?”
I have racks and racks of references that I can chop up and Frankenstein it together to create what I want. That’s my sketch.
Let’s address time—the speed of a creative process.
Lopez: [Laughs] I’m bored halfway through a collection. I don’t want to see it anymore.
Scott: Immediacy is essential. Although for my last collection, I was collaborating with Wifredo Lam’s Estate and I didn’t want it to end.
Lopez: My collections embody my stories—and I have a lot to say and share. There’s an energy we derive from the insane timelines of our business. Be it six months or one night, we are architects on a smaller scale, working faster.
How important is a fashion show to you?
Scott: Until recently, I was focused on presentations. I transitioned to the fashion show format because it [translates better] for the press and the people in the room. World-building in 12 minutes is a delirious exercise! You don’t sleep; you’re emotional and exhausted, but it’s incredible.
Lopez: I’m a show queen! With a fashion show, I bring people from different spaces and social classes and seat them next to each other. I like to seat a major fashion-world figure next to a little queen from Bushwick. They may have nothing in common except this show. Then they chat, and it becomes a friendship.
Moving from the ephemeral of presentations and fashion shows to bricks and mortar: How important is a year-round physical space that needs constant feeding?
Scott: It’s funny you ask this question. For the last month I have thought about bricks and mortar every single day.
Lopez: I’ve never wanted a store until a year ago. The majority of Luar’s business is direct-to-consumer and now I am craving a place that represents my vision where we can gather, try things on, talk shop and shop. But it’s hard. Getting a space is the easy part. It’s the bills, the staffing, the fulfillment of the space itself that need to be worked out.
Scott: I’m envisioning a store right now with the hopes of opening it before year’s end. I love my wholesalers but the consumer is not fully experiencing my collection in the way I desire. They should be immersed in the Diotima world. And people are interacting with this total expression and I can see them interacting and it changes me, it changes them.
What’s a place that holds special meaning for you?
Lopez: Faro a Colón [Columbus Lighthouse] in the Dominican Republic. The [island of the] DR [and Haiti] were the first places colonized by Spain, and the remains of Christopher Columbus are supposedly interred in this Brutalist monument. It’s this insane cross-shaped spectacle that can be seen all the way from Puerto Rico. The building projects lasers into the sky! It’s so loaded. I want to do a show there and reclaim the space for my ancestors.
Scott: My place is not as concrete but is also ancestral. I’m captivated by the Caribbean archipelago and the water. So many Brown forebears died in the water. One of the Lam paintings we incorporated in my Fall 2026 Diotima collection was La Marcheuse des îles, 1944, which translates to The Island Walker, someone who wanders from place to place. Recently, my wife and I took a short vacation to Grenada, an island neither of us had been to before. As we were landing, I began to sob: I was feeling so connected to the water, to the land, to a place I had never been before.
Lopez: Your ancestors come to you in different forms; you have to be open to it.
Order the Cult of Personality issue here.
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