For most, the diagnosis would sound terrible. The delicate sides of a jacket that Eva Joan had arrived, a repair workshop in the West Village, was “crushed”.
On a recent winter afternoon, Emma Villeneuve, a co-owner of the store, sat in a rear sewing bag watching the work that was done to repair it. A matching substance came to tackle the areas that were the weakest, she said, and the tailors of the store had patted and restored both the inside and the outside of the jacket. Then they had satin-stitched buttonholes, sewn on the buttons and let the bag suffocate.
“The customer wanted it to look integrated and that it did not look like a contrasting substance,” was Bjorn Eva Park, the business partner of Mrs. Villeneuve, Chimed in. Elsewhere in the room a wine stain on a blue dress was remedied with an embroidered flower.
The couple opened Eva Joan In 2021, in a small space next to Casa magazines. (“We spent a note under the door and signed our lease on a cigarette cabinet,” Mrs. Park recalled.) Neither of them had professional experience as a tailor. Mrs. Park, 31, worked in production design for fashion -shoots, and Mrs. Villeneuve, 32, did the design for films and commercials. But they each had worked on their own sewing projects and had a kind of company in mind that they had never seen before – one where they recover, changes, embroidery and education could be brought under the same roof. They also wanted to sell unique pieces and to be difficult for others for others to pursue their own projects.
The name of the store is a combination of the names of their grandmothers.
They wanted to show that repair work did not have to be ‘fast and dirty’, Mrs. Park said, but could be an ‘extravagant’ act instead. A job as small as a few saves woolen socksFor example, a little extra care – and flair – could put in.
Such recovery courts were also a way to save supposedly non -sold -off items that are getting away in the back of cupboards. Some of those clothing can be extremely personal for the customers who come to Eva Joan, who moved to a larger store in 2023 on 28 Jane Street.
“What we do is not for Bangeriken, because these are the stories of people,” said Mrs. Park. Mrs. Villeneuve agreed: “It is a very intimate relationship; Trust is required. “
Before he starts a repair, the Eva Joan-De Winkel team has about half a dozen employee consultations. They ask customers about color and texture preferences (Corduroy, yes! Butter-yellow, no!); How do they like to wear their clothes (loosely? High-tailed?); the origin of the garment; And whether it bears sentimentality. Some customers want a repair with seamlessness and invisibility, while others leave Eva Joan to fully revise a item of clothing as it considers necessary.
Over the years, the store has become known for its whimsical approach to embroidery and beautification: instead of trying to hide that a garment has been restored, it sometimes explains loudly. Ribbons and stains, silhouettes of horses and flowers are often meaningful signs that a piece of clothing has been repaired in Eva Joan. Among the fans of the store is the almost 100-year-old fashion star Dorothy Wiggins, who has a tweed jacket that is embroidered the store with a few pink ballet slippers.
One of their more challenging projects, said Mrs. Park and Mrs. Villeneuve, concerned a customer with blindness who brought tires that he wanted to be in a packing jacket and made operations based on touch.
“There is no common customer, just like there is no common project,” said Mrs. Villeneuve.
Orders can be performed from $ 8 for a button change of up to $ 450 for something like yourself. The typical lead time is approximately two weeks, depending on how the customer requests. It is all cataloged and stretched by hand, one of the romantic Anachronisms of the store.
“We go against the grain in some ways because we ask people’s attention; Decoupling is how capitalism thrives and we tell people to wait a long time, spend money and invest in things that people throw away, “said Mrs. Park. “It’s a pretty counterculture, and we believe, much more satisfactory: the reward is so much higher if you recover in something.”
As many people have argued the reality of clothing waste and environmental damage caused by cheap, mass -produced fashion, Eva Joan joins stains in New York, such as the Bode Tailor Shop on the Lower East Side of Manhattan; The consistency project in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn; Grace Land In Ridgewood, Queens; And PedalA store for mobile changes to a former roasted Peanuts Pushcart, which introduces a younger generation in clothing repair.
These companies can also feed a desire among some for an item that nobody else has in a shopping landscape dominated by fast fashion, said Ruby Redstone, 29, A fashion historian.
“As long as we have had clothing that we have recovered, and it is a very recent phenomenon that we will not recover our clothes,” said Mrs. Redstone. “It has been a rapid decline in the 21st century, but during the 20th century we saw many people who lose knowledge as clothing became more disposable.”
The menu of services that Eva Joan offers, combined with his aesthetic lens, added them: “It turns out that recovering something makes it better, more personal and puts our fears aside to let something look damaged, old or cheap.”
Mrs. Park and Mrs. Villeneuve hope to distribute their ethos. The store offers open studio -craft nights, workshops and conversations, sometimes given by Mrs. Redstone, a frequent employee. Last year she led with a tutorial about the brothels of bloomers. Recently the owners organized a retreat in Tuscany, Italy, where about a dozen attendees spent a weekend learning tax.
Now they want to expand their programming and open other Eva Joan repair workshops in other cities. They want their store to “be so omnipresent as a laundry,” said Mrs. Park, “although we will of course be careful and deliberately about it.”
For now, however, Eva Joan is still a neighborhood spot.
“I moved to the neighborhood 30 years ago, so I really saw the neighborhood change,” said a resident, Susie Lopez, 56, who works in philanthropy, “so many specialized stores, such as rare book stores, all these beautiful little treasures that left the village.
When she saw that Eva opened Joan on Jane Street, she ran with Champagne. “I thought what they were doing was so relevant, if necessary,” said Mrs. Lopez. “Something with quality and uniqueness returns to the village.”
Since then she has worked with the Eva Joan team on dozens of projects, including changing Kinderdungarees into a bag and 35 vintage Bandanna’s monogram for a literary prize that Mrs. Lopez sets up for teen creative writers.
“Sometimes I like to play a game to see if I can bring in something that they cannot revive,” she said. Until now they have only rejected one item, a flapper dress from the 1920s: “They didn’t think it was good to mess with it.”
