For this project, I chose the food court in Newport Mall as my field site. After eating in the food court for a few days, sitting there and wrote my field research notes, I was intrigued by the inclusive environment that the food court offers to all different kinds of people: no matter their race, age, social economic status, etc. At first, my project idea was to make an artboard that is full of scrap fabrics that I gathered around the school and place them on the board based on their colors. I wanted to make each color represent a different group of people that I saw at the food court, and together they made up the field site as a whole. However, when I started to pin fabrics/glue fabrics on the board, I failed to find a way to make the fabrics stay without showing the glue or pins which I did not want them to appear on the board. So I changed my idea and got the inspiration from the aprons the workers in the food court wears when they hand out samples to everyone who walked through the food court.

When I was visiting the site, I was surprised that the worker who handed out sampled gave literally everyone who walked by a sample-kids, couples, business people who work around the area, homeless people and even the genitors and their co-workers. I think this welcoming environment plays a huge part of the interconnectivity of the food court.

Below is a photo of one of the workers.

I made the garment from all scrap fabrics that I found just to make the piece look nicer overall(so it would not be on a naked manikin. Then I made the apron piece using a sewing machine and muslin. Here are some photos before I colored the piece with acrylic paint. I added the off-white looking buckles because I liked how that is a style(high-end street style vs. workers in the restaurants) that is such an opposite thing of the apron. I thought it did not look as uninformed as I wanted to look more uninformed so I painted it with a light blue color that is the same color as the table cloth looking fabric of the dress.

Here is my finished piece.