Kingcome Fashion

Robin, my niece and the teacher in Kingcome, wants to be nominated to go on What Not To Wear. What Not To Wear is a reality TV show that selects very poorly dressed people, secretly films them in their slovenly attire, and then presents them with the evidence before giving them fashion advice and a debit card loaded with $5000.

What Not To Wear is a very urban show, with lots of downtown scenery and shopping for the new wardrobe in big department stores and upscale boutiques. It is very NOT Kingcome which is a remote village up the coast of BC at the end of a two-hour water taxi ride at the end of Kingcome Inlet followed by a half-an-hour or so in a small boat or canoe up the river.

I imagine the hosts, Stacy and Clinton and the What Not To Wear crew coming to Kingcome to do the secret film footage to convince Robin that how she dresses is less than her fashion potential. They film her wheeling Baby James in his heavy-duty Kingcome stroller down the narrow gravel and sand road, across the soccer field wearing her thin and baggy plaid pajama bottoms and her blue cotton T-shirt. Then I imagine Stacey and Clinton doing The Intervention, showing Robin the secretly filmed footage and telling her what she needs to do to improve her wardrobe.

Robin’s already convinced. She comes out of her bedroom late on a Saturday afternoon, long past pajama time, pulls out the elastic waist-band of her plaid pajamas and says, “What kind of a person wears PJs like this?”

Later, she emerges from the bedroom and says, “You better tell Stacy and Clinton about this!” She’s changed into a bright yellow T-shirt that commands, “Kwak-wala Gaxan,” [speak Kwak-wala] and dark grey Capri pants with an interesting curled fringe just below her knees. Robin tells us she’s achieved this look by cutting the legs of her sweat pants and then cutting the half-inch fringe which curled on their own when she put them in the dryer.

The next day at the river as we’re getting into the punt to leave the village, Robin in her white T-shirt and very fashionable knee-length floral skirt proves to be wearing the perfect ensemble for wading barefoot into the icy water to push the boat off the sand and into the current and wave us off. As our boat heads out, she lifts the floral skirt to pull down her underwear and moon us good-bye.

What would Stacy and Clinton think of that?