The Kai Cenat VIVET runway debut drew more than 180,000 live viewers to a Twitch stream on Saturday, which by any measure is an extraordinary number for a brand nobody had heard of twelve months ago. The clothes, boxy hoodies, leather biker trousers, fur gilets, drawstring joggers, a floor-sweeping fur coat on Alton Mason for the final exit, were not extraordinary. They were the work of someone who has clearly absorbed a great deal of Demna and a great deal of Kanye West, filtered through the sensibility of a 24-year-old who has spent considerably more time in front of a camera than a cutting table. And yet the scale of the reaction, the ferocity of it in both directions, tells you that the clothes were never really the point.
VIVET, according to Tubefilter, takes its name from the Latin verb meaning ‘to live’, and has been in development for more than a year. During an extended hiatus from his Twitch account, Cenat travelled to Italy to work alongside expert tailors, studying manufacturing, pattern-making and leather construction. He also consulted with designers in Atlanta. None of this is the biography of someone who stumbled into fashion on a whim. It is, however, the biography of someone who came to fashion laterally, without the conventional credentials, and that is precisely what the argument is about.
The credentialism question at New York Fashion Week
The criticism arriving in Cenat’s direction tends to cluster around two anxieties: whether he did the work himself, and whether he was entitled to the platform in the first place. The first anxiety is largely redundant. The idea that a named designer personally executes every stitch in a collection is a fiction the industry maintains about itself with considerable effort; it is not a standard applied consistently, least of all at the major houses. The second anxiety is more interesting, because it touches on something real: the question of what New York Fashion Week is actually for, and who gets to decide.
Fashion critic Ayọ̀ Òjó, known as Fashion Roadman, attended Central Saint Martins himself, which gives his observation particular weight. Writing on Instagram, he noted that ‘a lot of people who went to fashion school feel entitled to opportunities just because of a degree. Kai created his own platform, lane and audience separate to the industry and is utilising it.’ This is accurate as far as it goes. The fashion degree as a prerequisite for legitimacy is a relatively recent idea, and it was never universally applied. Cenat is hardly the first designer without formal training, and he is not the first person famous for something else who turned to clothes: the Olsen twins, Victoria Beckham and Stella McCartney all arrived at fashion from other places and were met, initially, with comparable scepticism.
What is different here is the specific territory Cenat comes from. Musicians pivoting to fashion barely registers as news any more. A streamer doing the same still produces a particular kind of unease, one that probably has less to do with credentials than with the fact that streaming, as a form, remains culturally legible to some people as entertainment and to others as nothing at all. Fashion has spent years pursuing streamers and influencers as front-row guests and promotional apparatus. The discomfort, as the original piece observed, tends to arrive when they stop amplifying somebody else’s vision and start expressing their own.
What the polarised response actually reveals
Business of Fashion called Cenat ‘Gen Z’s answer to Virgil Abloh’. Others declared the collection everything wrong with fashion. Neither reading is serious. Both substitute a legible cultural position for actual criticism, and both, in their different ways, make it harder for a young designer to develop. The Kai Cenat VIVET runway debut is the work of someone at the very beginning of something: derivative in places, unresolved in others, but not without a coherent instinct about silhouette and volume. Treating it as either a generational statement or a category error is the same refusal to look at the clothes on their own terms.
Cenat is not the first digital creator to show at fashion week, though these ventures usually operate through direct-to-consumer channels rather than the runway. Matilda Djerf’s one-off NYFW show in 2023 is one of the few precedents. The Kai Cenat VIVET debut sits in that thin space between the expected and the genuinely new: a streamer who has done the groundwork, produced a flawed but legible first collection, and is now being asked to withstand a level of scrutiny that most designers at an equivalent stage of their careers simply never face. The collection showed in three acts. The next one will be more instructive.
