June 1, 2005: Headlines: COS - Botswana: Fashion: Minnesota Women's Press: On June 10, Botswana RPCV Joy Navrude's eveningwear design will walk down the runway as the winning entry in the fashion design category at Fashion Design + Composite Art, part of the b Michael Fashion Design Award competition in New York

Peace Corps Online: Peace Corps News: Library: Peace Corps: Fashion : Fashion: June 1, 2005: Headlines: COS - Botswana: Fashion: Minnesota Women's Press: On June 10, Botswana RPCV Joy Navrude's eveningwear design will walk down the runway as the winning entry in the fashion design category at Fashion Design + Composite Art, part of the b Michael Fashion Design Award competition in New York

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Botswana RPCV Joy Teiken's eveningwear design will walk down the runway

Botswana RPCV Joy Teiken's eveningwear design will walk down the runway

As a young child, Teiken said, she was passionate about fashion and design. She made paper dolls with paper clothes and watched TV beauty pageants that inspired her to draw designs of pageant gowns. Teiken and her mom shopped at thrift stores and rummage sales for clothes, and then she would alter them, adding little embellishments and creating her own unique style that was the envy of her friends. Joy Teiken served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Botswana.

Botswana RPCV Joy Teiken's eveningwear design will walk down the runway

New York spotlight shines on Twin Cities designer Joy Teiken

by Jeanne Pinette Souldern

In junior high school in Iowa, Joy Teiken wowed her friends with her ability to combine and redesign clothes bought at thrift stores and garage sales into eye-catching outfits. These days, the 37–year-old Twin Cities designer is wowing a much tougher audience: New York fashion critics.

On June 10, Teiken’s eveningwear design will walk down the runway as the winning entry in the fashion design category at Fashion Design + Composite Art, part of the b Michael Fashion Design Award competition in New York. Teiken’s design was selected in mid-March out of 300 applicants.

It is Teiken’s second runway show in the Big Apple in less than a month. In May, she was one of 30 new designers to compete in the seventh annual Gen Art Styles 2005 show. Teiken’s eye-catching original evening wear took a walk in front of a panel of judges that included designers, an editor from Harper’s Bazaar and the fashion director from Neiman Marcus, not to mention a glitterati audience of celebrities, media critics and department store buyers. Teiken’s designs were chosen to appear in the show from among some 850 entries from 29 states and 26 countries.

Although she didn’t win that competition, she did make some good connections and a favorable impression on the news editor at Elle magazine.

Teiken isn’t surprised by her quick rise to success. “When you do what you are supposed to be doing, good things happen.”

(photo at right) Retro meets hipster in JoyNoëlle’s ready-to-wear.Model posing in retro looking, shade of brown, striped dress
Photo by Brad Miller Photography

The making of a designer

Although most New Yorkers are seeing Teiken’s designs for the first time, her dresses, skirts, coats, evening and bridal gowns, hats and handbags have been garnering the attention of fashionable Minnesotans for years, well before Teiken even considered herself a designer.

Teiken was teaching art at the Creative Arts High School in Saint Paul when she first began designing hats and berets and selling them at consignment stores. But her design inspiration goes back farther than that: the first hat she made was for her mom, Jane Navrude, to wear to her brother’s wedding.

Navrude was sick with breast cancer for about 12 years and Teiken quit college to care for her. “It was life-changing,” she recalled, “also, the most beautiful thing you can do is to help the person you love the most die with dignity.”

In 1989, just before her mother died, Teiken helped her find a dress for the wedding, and she made a hat to go with it to cover her mother’s hair loss from chemotherapy. “My mom didn’t want to wear a wig,” she recalled. “This was back when most of the wigs had hair that was pretty synthetic looking, so I decided to make my mom a hat to match her dress.”

Her mother died three weeks after the wedding and was buried with the hat Teiken made her.

After her mom’s death, Teiken finished college in Iowa and got her teaching license. She then went to Africa to work with the Peace Corps for two and a half years.

She moved to the Twin Cities because of friends here and got a job teaching art at the Creative Arts High School in Saint Paul. “I loved teaching, but I felt like I should be doing something else—that there was something missing.”

That missing piece fell into place after Teiken bought her mother-in-law a vase for Christmas four years ago. The idea came as sort of an epiphany. “I didn’t want to use the traditional Christmas paper for wrap so I sewed a sack out of fabric to wrap it,” she explained.

That experience brought back the memory of her mom’s hat and a long-suppressed dream. “I wanted to be a fashion designer. I had wanted to be one when I was growing up, but my mom wanted me to be financially independent.”

Teiken had felt teaching would be a career that offered stability and security and, she adds, “something I could always fall back on. My mom was divorced and a single parent so financial security was important.”

But as a young child, Teiken said, she was passionate about fashion and design. She made paper dolls with paper clothes and watched TV beauty pageants that inspired her to draw designs of pageant gowns. Teiken and her mom shopped at thrift stores and rummage sales for clothes, and then she would alter them, adding little embellishments and creating her own unique style that was the envy of her friends.

Then the world of high fashion opened Teiken’s young eyes. “My mom was always well-dressed but I really knew nothing about fashion, that was until a friend of mine’s mom gave me a stack of her old Vogue magazines,” she recalled. Living on a limited budget, she continued to alter clothes in high school and college, adding details to blue jeans and jackets.

(right) JoyNoëlle’s ready-to-wearModel posing in pink polka dotted dress. Photo by Brad Miller Photography

Trend-setter

While she was still teaching, Teiken made hats and berets adorned with beads, feathers and silk flowers and sold them at consignment stores. She moved on to handbags, which she sold at the Uptown Art Fair under her label, Joynoëlle. Teiken knew she needed to move on to bigger projects, like dresses and coats, in order to create a successful career for herself.

Teiken started her own business two and a half years ago and phased out of her teaching job. She designs full time and has her own studio and showroom on the ground floor of an old warehouse on Como Avenue in Minneapolis. One end of the workroom is stuffed with bolts of colorful fabric, tall spindles of thread and sewing machines. The fabrics, some of them vintage, come from all over the world, including a vast collection of Japanese silk kimonos that she incorporates into many designs. The remainder of the space is devoted to her in-house collection of garments and accessories.

Teiken took out a home equity line of credit to start her business, which, despite the attention she’s getting, is still in its infancy. “I had to do it on my own,” she said. “I am living month to month at this point, but I’m doing it.”

And she is doing it without advertising. She relies on word-of-mouth accolades from her clientele, like Kelly Evans of North Oaks, who first met Teiken five years ago at the Uptown Art Fair. Evans’ husband bought her one of Teiken’s handbags and a hat. When they got home he asked her what she was going to wear it with.

Evans called Teiken, who was working out of her home, and asked if she could make her a matching skirt. They worked on a design together and Evans has been a repeat customer. “She’s able to evaluate each client and pick out colors and designs that are so personal and that make you feel good about yourself,” Evans said.

Teiken’s designs are so versatile and classic, Evans said, that they can be worn for a casual look with blue jeans or to a fancy black tie event in New York. “Joy’s work is couture, no different than what the women in Paris are doing.”

Teiken’s customers are often shopping for an outfit for a special event, like a prom, a wedding or a special party. She works with them to choose fabrics and colors–“something beautiful that is them; the garment really does become them.”

Her typical client, she said, is a woman “with a certain state of mind. She wants something special and unique and wants to be noticed because she feels good about how she looks.”

Prices vary depending on style, fabric, details and accents but dresses start at $300. Hats and handbags are priced between $90 and $150. Coats start at $400, but a long silk coat with fur collar and cuffs sells for $1,800. Custom wedding gowns start at around $3,000.

At the beginning of this year, Teiken decided she was ready to bring her designs to a wider audience. On a whim, she decided to test the waters by entering a couple of design competitions. Gen Art’s Styles International Design Competition seemed a good place to start. Gen Art helps emerging designers, musicians and artists get their work shown—something that isn’t always easy for a midwestern designer.

Self-promotion is sometimes considered arrogant here in the land of Minnesota nice, yet that is what you need to do if you own a business, Teiken said. “In New York you have to be ‘out there,’” she added, and be fearless and confident in promoting your work.

“The male designers have those qualities but the women designers come out on the runway after their show looking kind of meek. But someone like [designer] Betsey Johnson will do cartwheels down the runway.” Teiken admits it takes a delicate balance “not to go overboard,” but that female artists hurt themselves because “they don’t push themselves out there.”

Her success in both competitions brings hopes for further exposure to a national audience, but Teiken is sanguine about her future. “I am open to whatever happens.”

A picture of her mom in her hat sits on Teiken’s desk. “I am doing what I am supposed to be doing and I have my guardian angel—my mom.”

Joynoëlle’s showroom, located at 2115 Como Ave. S.E. in Minneapolis, is open Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 3 p. m. Custom services are available by appointment. To see some of Teiken’s designs, visit her website at www.joynoelle.com.

The profile appears in every issue of the Minnesota Women’s Press. It reflects our founding principle and guiding philosophy that every woman has a story. Readers are welcome to submit suggestions for profile subjects.





When this story was posted in June 2005, this was on the front page of PCOL:


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Story Source: Minnesota Women's Press

This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Botswana; Fashion

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