Kdon - Maps and legends

(CC) Phillip Jeffrey. www.fadetoplay.com. 

Kim Cathers, I've decided, was destined NOT to win Project Runway Canada.

Don't get me wrong. She is a great maker of clothes.

But reviewing her latest collection of Fall Winter clothes, I now understand Kim Cathers is a fairytale teller and urban fantasist with  strong regional inflections. Her sense of fashion is very hard to digest through television and the fast hard cuts of reality television editing.

Cathers' clothes are like a dusk snowfall among a stand of arbutus trees. It is poetic, frail and very West Coast.

She is telling a story about a place where a city of millions and a massive rain forest sit side by side. A mountain could shrug its shoulders and what we call civilization could be flung into the sea.

Cloak-ish hooded coats, bloomer- or britches-like knee pants and horn buttons combine into a tale from the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen, if Little Red Riding Hood carried an iPhone and loved buying studded riding boots.

I once met a bearded man who lived in a log cabin on the edge of the town of Hope.

Against the back wall where the fireplace was located he had carved an entire bas-relief inspired by JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit  -- with a chainsaw! To Cathers' collection--somehow they are connected.

Magical.