Darin Wyly
Darin Wyly and Adrian Winston started Live Above in 2013, when both men were students at Tennessee State University.
“That’s when we learned that we had similar stories,” Wyly says. Both had played basketball at different universities before transferring to TSU, and both had lost a parent to cancer.
“We were kind of going through the same emotions,” Wyly says. “We understood that if we can make ourselves feel good, we can do it for other people too. We can try to inspire people to, you know, live above what they’re going through.”
Since founding the streetwear company, Winston has relocated to Atlanta, while Wyly, originally from Cincinnati, decided to stay in Nashville with his young family. The two remain business partners, overseeing operations out of their space at 100 Taylor St. in Germantown, as well as a robust online business. But the heart of the company will always be in Nashville.
“We started at a time where Nashville was actually growing as well,” Wyly says. “It was at the cusp of where Nashville was going.” It’s telling that the company started the same year that The New York Times dubbed Nashville “It City.”
But more than being just a Nashville brand, Live Above has deep roots at TSU.
“TSU was a big audience for us,” says Wyly. “That’s where we came from, and because we were walking around campus with our products, it was our test market as well. So seeing what they liked and being able to put that interest into everybody else was what pretty much propelled us to a different level.”
The team makes chunky knit flannel shirts and sporty basketball shorts with unexpected designs like florals or tiger stripes. They even make ball caps and backpacks, all with the tagline “Live Above” emblazoned on them in some way.
“We call them feel-good fabrics,” Wyly says. “Whenever you put on a piece of our clothing, we want to make sure that you feel good, and to inspire you to not go through what you went through. Whenever you put on our clothes, it’s to make you say, ‘Hey, I’m living above today. I can get through it, and I can get to that next pinnacle.’”
Talking to six of the city's most interesting designers and checking out some of Nashville’s best street style
