The Building That Changed Everything — Twice

On going back to the place where it all began, this time as a founder

There is a building in downtown Columbus at 122 N. Grant Ave. Most people walk past it without a second thought. To me, it is the most significant address I have ever known.

In 1999, I walked through its doors as a student. I was a Brazilian immigrant who didn't speak English. I couldn't understand my teacher. I couldn't follow the conversations around me. I sat in class surrounded by dress forms, fabric bolts, and half-finished sketches, understanding almost nothing — and feeling, for the first time since arriving in this country, completely at home.

Even when words failed, creativity spoke loud and clear.

What No One Tells You About Starting Over

Immigration is many things. It is possibility and loss living side by side. It is the particular loneliness of being surrounded by people and unable to reach them. It is learning, slowly and imperfectly, to trust that the version of yourself who exists in your first language is still in there — waiting.

For me, fashion was the bridge. Not fashion in the industry sense — not the magazines or the runways or the price tags. Fashion as a language that every human being already speaks. The language of how we present ourselves to the world. Of what we choose to carry on our bodies and why. Of the stories stitched into the seams of what we wear.

At Columbus College of Art & Design, in that building on Grant Avenue, I began to learn that language in English. And something shifted that has never shifted back.¹

Twenty-Five Years in Between

What happened between 1999 and now is the story of a life built with intention and held together with grit. Two degrees. A fashion column. Businesses started, grown, and evolved. Hundreds of students. Thousands of garments. A community that grew up around the conviction that fashion — approached with care, with ethics, with creativity — can be a force for human good.

There were years of single motherhood. Years of building without a safety net. Years of walking into rooms where I was the only immigrant, the only Latina, the only person who didn't fit the expected profile of a fashion authority — and choosing, every time, to stay in the room.

I stayed because I knew something those rooms didn't always recognize: that the most powerful fashion education doesn't happen in the pages of Vogue. It happens when a child picks up a piece of fabric and feels, for the first time, that their creativity is real and worth something.²

The most powerful fashion education doesn't happen in the pages of Vogue. It happens when a child picks up a piece of fabric and feels their creativity is real.

The Move

In the summer of 2025, Columbus Fashion Academy and The Fashion Community moved into our new home. The address: 122 N. Grant Ave.

The same building.

There were no investors. No grants. No outside capital. There were five storage units, multiple trucks, a team of people who believe in this work, and a mission too strong to let go. We moved everything ourselves, piece by piece, into the space where I first understood that I belonged.

I walked through the door on move-in day and stood still for a moment. Twenty-six years collapsed into a single breath. The 1999 version of me — lost, quiet, unable to ask for directions in the language of the city she had just arrived in — was standing in the same room as the 2025 version. The one who runs three organizations, produces runway shows, mentors hundreds of students, and is writing a book.

I don't have words for what that felt like. But I have tried to write it anyway, because some moments deserve to be kept.

Who This Is For

Every day now, children walk through that door. They come for after-school programs and summer camps and Fashion Lab Days. They come because a parent trusted us, because a teacher mentioned us, because a friend brought them along. They come not knowing yet what they will find.

What they find is a space where their ideas are taken seriously. Where making something with your hands is understood as an act of intelligence. Where the question is never 'can you afford this style' but always 'what do you want to say, and how do we help you say it?'

No child should grow up feeling alone, unheard, or unseen. No one should be denied the chance to discover who they are through creativity. That was true for the 1999 version of me sitting in a classroom without the words to ask a question. It is true for every child who walks through that door today.

The building didn't change. The mission didn't change. What changed is that now we own the space — not legally, not yet, but in the way that matters: we fill it with purpose every single day.

We fill it with purpose every single day.

What Comes Next

The stories that have unfolded inside these walls — and inside the ones before this, and the ones before those — are the reason I am writing my book, Goodbye (Toxic) Fashion. Real stories, Columbus stories, of people whose lives quietly shifted when they encountered a different relationship with what they wear.

I didn't plan those stories. I didn't program them. They happened in the margins of the work, while I was busy showing up. And I only learned about them because someone, eventually, circled back to tell me.

That is the thing about doing this kind of work. The impact is rarely visible in the moment. It lives in the after. In the phone call years later. In the daughter who tells you her mother left you everything she owned. In the 5-year-old who asked for a scrap of fabric to remember the kind people she met.

I went back to 122 N. Grant Ave to keep building. But what I found when I got there was proof that I had already been building all along.

References

1. Columbus College of Art & Design (CCAD) has been a cornerstone of Columbus's creative community since 1879. https://www.ccad.edu

2. Research on creative confidence and youth development: Brown, B. (2010). The Gifts of Imperfection. Hazelden Publishing. https://brenebrown.com

Priscila Teixeira is an award-winning community leader, passionate educator, fashion artist, and public speaker. She is the Founder & CEO of TalkingFashion Inc. and Columbus Fashion Academy, and Founder & Executive Director of The Fashion Community, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. With 40+ years in the fashion industry and a mission to transform waste into wonder, Priscila believes fashion is not a surface — it is a discipline that works from the inside out. She writes from Columbus, Ohio, where she has lived for over 25 years.