The Student Who Built a Streetwear Brand Before Graduation

There is a particular kind of ambition that does not wait for permission. Davonte' Walls launched Privilege Closet in 2022, still a student at Savannah State University in Georgia, with a clear and unhurried conviction: that streetwear could carry the weight of high fashion without abandoning the culture it came from.

He was twenty years old. He was studying marketing. And he was already building a brand.

Where It Started

Privilege Closet LLC began the way most real founder stories do — not with a pitch deck or an accelerator application, but with a problem the founder felt personally. Walls noticed a gap between what streetwear looked like and what it could mean. The best of the genre had always moved at the intersection of cultural currency and craft: the cut of a garment, the weight of a fabric, the way a colorway could signal membership in something larger than a single collection.

What he wanted to make was clothing that inspired confidence and expressed individuality — not by borrowing the language of luxury fashion and applying it to a street aesthetic, but by treating that intersection as the genuine creative premise of the brand. The name itself carries that intention. Privilege is not about wealth or exclusivity. It is about access to the version of yourself you choose to present to the world.

From Georgia, Walls began building collections that spanned menswear and womenswear — casual streetwear, athletic-inspired silhouettes, pieces that move across contexts without losing their identity. The range is deliberate: Privilege Closet is not trying to own one lane. It is trying to define what it looks like when street style and high fashion are genuinely equal partners in a single garment.

The Brand

Follow Privilege Closet for a few weeks and the thesis becomes clear. The brand is not performing streetwear for an audience that expects it. It is designing from a position of genuine taste — which is rarer than it sounds, particularly for a founder still in school, still learning the mechanics of running a business while simultaneously building one.

The collections sit across a deliberate range. Casual streetwear anchors the line, but athletic-inspired pieces give the brand a versatility that most nascent labels avoid. Menswear and womenswear are treated as parallel threads rather than an afterthought add-on. Every piece is meant to do the same thing: make the person wearing it feel like they chose it for a reason.

That design philosophy — quality-driven, confident, rooted in the belief that what you wear shapes how you move — is not incidental to the brand. It is the brand. Walls is not building Privilege Closet around a founder story that happens to include clothing. He is building a clothing brand that is inseparable from the way he thinks about identity, aspiration, and what it means to occupy your space with intention.

Black Ambition and What It Means

In 2026, Davonte' Walls was selected for Pharrell Williams' Black Ambition Fundable Founders Learning Lab — a competitive program that identifies Black and Hispanic entrepreneurs whose companies are positioned for real growth and connects them with the resources, mentorship, and network to get there.

The selection is not ceremonial. Black Ambition operates on the premise that the financing gap facing minority founders is structural, not incidental, and that closing it requires more than encouragement. The Fundable Founders program is designed to move founders from promising to investable — the kind of preparation that changes the arc of a company.

For Privilege Closet, the recognition arrives at a meaningful moment. Walls has spent four years building the brand from a university campus, with the constraints that come with being a full-time student and a full-time founder simultaneously. The Black Ambition selection signals that the market is watching — and that the brand is further along than the founder's age might suggest.

It also places Privilege Closet in proximity to a network that most streetwear founders at this stage never reach: investors, operators, and mentors who have navigated the precise transition from cultural relevance to commercial durability. That proximity is a kind of leverage that takes years to manufacture on your own.

What Comes Next

Davonte' Walls is graduating from Savannah State University with a marketing degree and a running brand. That combination — formal training in how markets work, lived experience building inside one — is not common. Most founders learn one and approximate the other. He is finishing both at the same time.

The question for Privilege Closet now is the same question every quality-driven streetwear brand eventually faces: how do you scale the thing that makes you the brand without flattening it in the process? How do you grow distribution and production without losing the editorial sensibility that turned browsers into customers in the first place?

Walls has spent four years answering a harder version of that question with fewer resources than he will have going forward. The Black Ambition cohort, the marketing degree, the brand itself — these are not decorations on the founder profile. They are evidence of the kind of thinking that built the company in the first place.

Privilege Closet is Georgia-born streetwear for people who dress with intention. It was built by a student who decided that was not a reason to wait.