The objective of the project was to research a neighborhood and create a garment that represented the chosen neighborhood. From the start I knew the difficulties would root from it being a group project. Designing our garment was a battle whether to focus on modern day style or involve historic aspects. The lower east side has such a strong background that could it not be ignored. Taking the route of history was a bit difficult to relate to the people in the lower east side, as well as the setting. Taking time to research and have a background of our neighborhood through essays and physically taking a trip to the lower east side made the garment easier to mentally create.

Constructing the garment we knew that we wanted to have a hard shell look to it, to feel safe and confide. Using mesh we constructed a bustier for the hard shell look. Knowing that chain mail served as armor for warriors, we draped it over the model to give it a more delicate powerful feel. Since the whole body was structured in metal mesh and draped with more metal we decided to give the bottom a destroyed look of what remained. Using tool of different shades of grey we created a flame look to give the garment a winning feel, having the garment win against the fire. This was not what our initial sketch looked like. Our initial thought of the design was to have the whole garment made up of mostly chain mail.

During the design process we hit an obstacle of that chain mail is time consuming when home made, and also expensive to buy individual links. We needed 100% from each person in the group, which was not occurring. These obstacles led to decreasing the appearance of the garment.

The garment itself was completely unique; it had qualities that other classmates lacked. Some details were sloppy; I do wish that could have been fixed with better time management skills from our group mates. Constructing the garment was not my strength; it gave me the opportunity to learn outside my comfort zone. This project had a great balance of all mediums, I was able to also stay inside my comfort zone of photographing the garment, and this was the highlight of the project. Coming out of this project I was relieved it was over, now thinking back at it, it served as a huge lesson for the way I work. The world we live in is not as independent as we would like to think it to be, everyone has a certain set of skills/talents that we need to use from one another. Working in a group allowed me to see that combing skills can have an incredible end result.