By Jezlan Moyet, president of Georgia Entertainment & Georgia Insider
This September, Kai Cenat traded his streaming setup for a New York Fashion Week runway, unveiling Vivet, a Georgia-based brand he owns outright. He spent nearly a year learning how clothes are actually made, traveling to production facilities and to Italy to work with tailors. Then he came back to Atlanta to seek out designers and build the brand here.
That last detail is critical. Atlanta didn’t earn a place in that story as a traditional fashion capital, far from it. But it does influence everything; Atlanta has established its signature style as the place where creative expertise, business infrastructure and cultural credibility increasingly show up in the same room.
The proof is everywhere once you start looking. Clark Atlanta University and SCAD’s School of Fashion are building a talent pipeline whose graduates now work at Chanel, The Row, Thom Browne and Vogue. Fulton County has made fashion part of its formal creative-economy investment. Atlanta Fashion Week put HBCU student designers on the runway alongside the debut of Adidas Originals’ Spring/Summer 2026 collection. And some of the city’s most consistent fashion activity is coming from companies whose core business has nothing to do with apparel, from Coca-Cola to the Atlanta Braves to Waffle House.
None of them set out to become fashion brands. They became fashion participants because they understood something every business leader in Georgia should sit with: fashion is one of the fastest, most legible ways to put a brand’s identity in front of new audiences. It’s storytelling you can wear.
The full convergence story and what it signals for Georgia’s creative economy, is unpacked in a new feature on Georgia Insider, read more here.
Join Georgia Entertainment at the FACEs of Fashion “Art of Influence” fashion show on September 27 in Atlanta, limited tickets available.
