The energy outside Cipriani, in Lower Manhattan, across from theCharging Bull statue on Broadway, seemed conspicuously suspended in a different time. It was as if crossing the threshold into the Financial District sent me back a decade, to the genesis
of this current generation’s cultural aesthetic—to the lines at VFiles, theSoHo clothing store whose Howard St. storefront once served as epicenter of the nascent fusion of the worlds of streetwear, hip-hop, and high fashion. All of this was because Kai Cenat, the popular Twitch streamer and content creator, was making his runway debut. The fashion show for his brand Vivet’s first collection drew a crowd of the current generation’s innovators, giving a reminiscent feeling to the last time a popular figure came crashing through the gates of mainstream fashion.
In attendance that night were popular streamers like Jasontheween, Rakai, and Duke Dennis, alongside more traditional celebrity names: Jaden Smith, Luka Sabbat, Lauryn Hill (!). Popular fashion podcasters and journalists from the New York Times filtered through the crowd as well. It reminded me of the pre-pandemic days of fashion week pop-ups in the shadow of Ye’s YZY Szn launches, when the crowds outside seemed as consequential as whoever had a seat inside. Social media had given a generation of streetwear obsessives and aspiring artists a way to build their own audiences, and fashion was beginning to accommodate them. At Cipriani, the streamers had brought another audience into the room.
“When I first saw this space, I was at awe,” Cenat told me after the show. This particular Cipriani, with its neo-Renaissance-style ceilings and grand, opulent interior, was the venue for Alexander Wang’s fall 2013 show, where a then-on-the-rise A$AP Rocky sat front row. The room was part of how Kai wanted people to experience the clothes. “And perception is just as important as everything, the clothes, the music, everything.”
Guests received personalized invites, a Vivet journal documenting Kai’s journey starting the brand, replete with Polaroids taped in the pages. Initially, Cenat wanted to call the line Eterna. In the early pages of the journal, there are photos of a red hockey jersey bearing the name, which he wrote was already taken. “It was hard for me to move away from this name,” he noted. “I have to start again.” According to the show notes, Vivet takes its name from Latin meaning “he, she, or it will live forever,” a reference to his ambition to make clothes that outlast trends.
Another page shows a photo of a small leather pillow, the first item he sewed himself. In an entry about his private sewing lessons, he admitted, “I was very impatient,” and described initially hating hand stitching. The work hurt his hands, but he came to understand its uses: closing gaps and finishing parts of a garment a machine couldn’t reach. The runway opened with the Beginner Hoodie, the first Vivet piece Cenat sewed by hand, following months spent studying construction and manufacturing in Italy. The show notes describe the opening hoodies and sweatpants as deliberately misshapen, with an oversized silhouette and heavy jackets worn open.
At first, Kai shared clips of that learning process on social media, hoping fans who missed him after he took time away from streaming would appreciate the transparency. Instead he became a meme, with much of the internet calling his journey into fashion disingenuous. That criticism, too, felt familiar. Reviewing Kanye West’s 2011 womenswear debut, The Telegraph’s Lisa Armstrong wrote: “It was the equivalent of Karl Lagerfeld launching a hip-hop career: i.e. absurd.” Beyond just seeing him as an outsider, the loudest critiques of Cenat’s foray into fashion seem to be wrapped up in a broader disdain for streamer culture writ large.
Interestingly, it was the streamer community’s presence that made the show feel innovative. In February, designer Elena Velez cast Clavicular, the streamer known for promoting extreme methods of improving his appearance, in her New York Fashion Week show. That felt like a gimmick. (The designer similarly invited CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, whose absurd podcast stories about life inside the agency have gone viral on TikTok, to walk in her presentation over the weekend.) The streamers at Kai’s show were his contemporaries, people from the world in which he’d built his career. I spotted Rakai, a fellow Twitch streamer and Cenat protégé who frequently appears alongside him, whose rise on Twitch over the past few years has made him all but ubiquitous on young people’s feeds.
“You have to be honest with who you are and what world you stem from,” Cenat told me. “So it was just very honest to include those people in the world.” A handwritten chart in the journal lays out the show’s three stages: Under “Stage 1,” “self doubt” and “overthinking” sit alongside “rough seams” and “tears.” By “Stage 3,” he’s writing “Self Belief” and “Confident.” The show progressed in three similarly themed acts.
“I just was honest with myself,” Cenat explained. “The way I was writing in my journal is exactly what I wanted to put on the runway.” He describes the progression “from act one being lost and not knowing what to do and using simpler items to the clothes getting stronger and stronger and stronger.” By the third act, he said, “everything was super powerful, same with the music that represents everything.”
The clothes moved from hoodies and sweatpants into heavy leather overcoats, skinny denim, and boots, before arriving at tailored suiting and silk. Cotton canvas, neoprene, denim, and leather formed the collection’s material base, with warm ground tones interrupted by white, silver, mustard, and blue. Exposed seams and hand-applied waxes and varnishes emphasized the construction and surface of the clothes. Even the styling followed the progression: Jackets and coats worn open in the first two acts were closed in the third.
Perhaps most surprising was how complete the collection was. Rather than launch with a small capsule of a few pieces, Vivet’s first season included menswear, womenswear, outerwear, and footwear. You could certainly argue it stretched an early designer’s efforts a bit thin, but Cenat did execute a number of impressive looks, and the attention to material quality was immediately noticeable in person. The waxed cargo jacket, made of custom dyed heavyweight canvas, had the kind of detailed construction you’d expect from materials-focused luxury brands like Loro Piana.
Towards the end of the show, a female model came trundling down the runway, adorned in one of the collection’s more elegant coats crafted from a buoyant faux fur. Her exaggerated stomps made the coat flow in almost hypnotic rhythm. “Yes, that was great,” Cenat told me when I mentioned the look. He was pleased with the womenswear in particular: “They did incredible.”
The mood by the end of the show was something of pleasant surprise. Even if you weren’t among those making memes about Kai Cenat trying to start a fashion brand, seeing this kid known for being a goofball in his bedroom put out a genuinely respectable line of product, with a coherent vision and presentation, felt kind of inspiring in the most 2010s way. It was reminiscent of the optimism around the rise of creatives like Virgil Abloh, who, in reconstructing who and what counted as high fashion, helped lay the foundation for a more expansive mainstream culture.
In that sense, a line Cenat wrote in the invitation journal feels a little easier to take at face value. “Don’t be boxed in!!!” he wrote. “You can do anything in the world.”
Click here to read the full article.
