Megan Tong Research

This first piece is of me cutting the nut

This book was suggested to me and even though I haven’t finished it yet it’s very interesting. It helped me learn techniques for my dress making projects without feeling like all the research.

This dress symbolises how women are perceived. The reason I have sewed this particular underwear on the dress is because it’s not why people would call sexy. It’s every day underwear but it reminds the audience that some people think women are there for one thing and to please a man.

It was suggested to me to present ‘My Covid Dress’ in the place that started my inspiration. Not only is the residential/nursing home the place where I gained my empowerment, but it is the place that saved me from Covid. At the beginning of Covid, I was a bar manager who (like everyone else) got furloughed. No university, no work, no interaction. I personally was really struggling with the stay at home life. The wage I got from furlough was short of my rent meaning I had to move out of my house and back to my mothers’s. I felt so unpowerful, worthless and mentally challenged everyday. I told my mother I did not want to go back to work so she got me a job at my mother’s work. At first the idea of looking after people did not seem like my type of career. That being said it is the best thing I could have done. The dress looks back at my dissertation and the empowerment of a ‘dress’. how Queen Elizabeth I said her dresses were like her armour. I took this ideology and created my final piece out of my Covid armour; the nursing tunic. This dress is created predominantly out of different colour nursing tunics donated by people I work with or live near and people I’ve never even met but caught ear of my project. This gave me an overwhelming sense of community and it felt so amazing. It made me more determind to finish. Overall, the dress took about 400 hours to plan, collect, size up, sewing and stick the piece together. It is something I am very proud of.