What the Frock!?! - Getting started

Getting started - a piece of chaos and somewhere in there will appear some order.

Well that's the way it feels at the beginning of something new.

So what is What the Frock all about?

Placed in specific locations along K Rd, 'What the Frock' is a collaborative work involving fashion, rubbish, recycling and repurposed materials that show all the magic and glory that is K Rd, its present and its past.  Our mission is to dress up K Rd as part of First Thursdays and the New Zealand Fashion Festival and the bodies will be the bins along the street.

To capture K Rd's magic and glory from both its past and its present - artists will 'own' a site and tell something of the story behind its past, present and maybe even future. It may now be a shop but in its past could have been a brothel, someone's home, a pub or a bank

Skirts must be finished by 28 February - to be installed on 1 March.

Last Tuesday we had our first get together of the people who will make 'What the Frock!?!'. I've had a few strange looks in K Rd, especially after photographing the bins as well as measuring them up for skirts. Then came the challenge of matching the bins to the buildings so that our designers could decide what they wanted to make. That was when chaos began. We had the help of a historian and some of the things I learned:

• 1YA used to broadcast from the George Court building rooftop radio towers. The building also was the Air Raid Central Command for Auckland during WWII.
• K Rd did not really become a red light district [or strip] until the shops between West St and Cobden St were demolished in the 1960s to make way for the motorway. This is now the K Rd Overbridge
• There used to be a pastry cook and confectionery business where the Walia Superette is now

So, some of the bins proposed will celebrate K Rd's red light history, it's theatre history, its demolition and its role as a path from the ridge to the sea.

And this blog will capture the work as it progresses