Aspiring Designer showing at Charlotte Fashion Week

As a little girl, Teresa Jennette Faulk stripped her dolls down to their bare plastic skin and sat on the floor with her mom, armed with a sharp pair of scissors, a vivid imagination and pile of old clothes.
Teresa could see the new clothes in her mind. Together, she and her mom cut scraps from their discarded wardrobe to make new, fashionable outfits for the dolls.
“I cared more about the clothes than the dolls,” Faulk recalls.
Focus and attention to details are starting to pay off for Faulk, now a blossoming fashion designer known by her design name, Teresa Jennette. Her work will be featured during Charlotte Fashion Week, which starts Tuesday.
Faulk is one of only six emerging designers to have been selected to showcase their work during Charlotte’s fall fashion show.
The week will include a night with runway models exhibiting 10 of her original designs in front of upscale buyers on Friday at the downtown Hilton Charlotte Center City.
Fashion weeks are held in major cities across America, allowing designers to display their work for boutiques, department stores and shoppers. Charlotte Fashion Week, produced by CharlotteSeen, was started in 2010. Last year, the company says, it attracted more than 6,000 attendees.
Faulk hopes to build a relationship with buyers and build a buzz for her developing brand of ready-to-wear women’s clothes. She said that growing up in the South taught her women’s three most important clothing concerns.
“Can she wear it to work? Can she wear it to church? And can she wear it to flirt?” Faulk said. “When I say flirt, I mean like a date night, cocktails with friends or a formal event.”
She said her clothes are versatile and available in sizes 0 to 24.
“I’m concerned with all women, not just a certain size,” she said.
Faulk, a 2009 Lancaster High School graduate, didn’t travel a runway-straight line to the world of design.
She spent her first year after high school working as a fashion stylist for Charlotte celebrities including Carolina Panthers player Jonathan Stewart. The year after that she enrolled at USCL to study fashion merchandizing. None of that satisfied her creative fire for design.
Her frustration led her to work for several retailers including Victoria’s Secret and Forever 21 to learn the business side of having a retail store. She hoped to open a boutique clothing store someday.
But she changed directions after not being able to find affordable quality
clothing. At age 25, she became a seamstress.
“You know what, I think I will make my own clothes,” she said to herself and then to her mom.
She sold the furniture in her apartment and bought her first sewing machine on Black Friday last year.
Her mom, Jennifer Faulk, invited her to move back home to pursue her dream full-time.
“I had fears. I did this on a whim and feared this was not going to work,” she said. “If this doesn’t work, I am going to sell this sewing machine and do something else.”
It took her 10 hours to sew her first skirt.
“Now I could make it in 30 minutes,” she said, laughing.
“My mom is my No. 1 investor. If i need anything as far as fabric, which is expensive for the clothes I am making, she gets it,” Faulk said.
“And she told me to not even worry about working a job outside this right now.
“Without knowing if I would be any good at this, she took a chance, and I really appreciate it,” she said.

Mom and daughter have been roommates for the past 10 months, and neither reports any issues.
“She’s my best friend,” said Jennifer Faulk.
After the fashion show, Faulk will be busy filling orders from her Facebook page and website. She received two orders this past week. One for the Caprice wedding gown along with nine bridesmaid dresses, and another for 10 bridesmaid dresses.
Faulk hopes to hone and sharpen her self-taught skills by studying couture at the London College of Fashion in the near future.
Faulk has been wrapping things up for her upcoming show. About nine outfits hung behind her as she made a few last stitches here and there. Sitting at the kitchen table in the house she grew up in, she described some of the outfits and the inspiration behind them.
Faulk designs with thoughts of special family members and tries to sew their personalities into the outfits. One form-fitting dress, made of a burnout velvet fabric in a rich burgundy color called port wine, was inspired by the memory of her grandmother, Mae Carol Hughes.
“My grandmother had the perfect hour-glass shape, and when she dressed up, she was beautiful,” Faulk said. “I loved to watch her get ready to go out.”
Faulk said her grandmother had a “weird, funky style” and customized everything she wore. Her grandmother loved the Chicago Bulls so she customized a Bulls T-shirt to jazz it up a little. 
Faulk sat behind her sewing machine and spoke of her future beyond the fashion show. Originally, she wanted to offer clothes to people to help them feel good about themselves, but her dreams have grown bigger and deeper than the fickle world of fashion.
The girl who taught herself to sew watching YouTube videos less than one year ago, said her dream is to one day have a manufacturing plant in Lancaster and a couple of boutiques.
“I looked around my neighborhood and it made me want to help people have something to do, to make,” she said. “I’d have Bible study at work and give them weekends off.”
To view the Teresa Jennette line of fashions, visit teresajennette.com.
Follow Reporter Mandy Catoe on Twitter @MandyCatoeTLN or contact her at (803) 283-1152