Nina Means is a rising star in fashion design. She earned an international fashion degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York, has studied in Florence, Italy, has designed for major brands, and has her own clothing brand called Nina Means. Now she has embarked on an even more challenging project: Director for the Austin Community College Fashion Incubator.

The College has one other incubator—in the biosciences—and the two will collaborate as well as operate independently of each other. More on that later. But based on the bioscience success, the City of Austin approached the College to explore the creation of a brand-new venture, the Fashion Incubator. Nina’s goal as Director is to lead the strategy and development of an instruction-centric fashion incubator, reaching students, emergent fashion designers, and the local industry. The City identified fashion as a major growth industry for the area. Austin, Tex., is probably not the first place you think of when considering the fashion industry; but Means notes that the fashion industry was responsible for $86 million in industry impact there in 2013, and there are more than 1,300 fashion jobs in the area, people that consider themselves actively engaged in fashion. However, it is highly fragmented, and another goal of this project would be to create synergy among those now-fragmented silos of industry influence through a space that serves as an anchor for a new industry.

To get the ball rolling, the City of Austin is helping with some of the infrastructure for the Incubator, located in the old Highland Mall, to the tune of some $300,000 plus in-kind services. The incubator is also benefiting from an academic lease contract that brings its monetary investment down to roughly $150,000 over three years, an amount that is covered by City of Austin Economic Development initiatives. As in many communities, this Austin mall fell on hard times, and the Fashion Incubator offers a version of retail resurrection that can provide a good model for other communities to follow.