Chip and Pepper pop in

PHOTO BY TOM THOMSON Enlarge Image 

Pepper (left) and Chip Foster with pals Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy at the launch of the new Chip & Pepper clothing line in Los Angeles in July 2007.

The perpetual-motion twins, Chip and Pepper Foster, who broke onto the local fashion scene in the late '80s as brash party boys selling tie-dye T-shirts on the beach at Lake Winnipeg, are opening a temporary store for the Christmas season in Kenora.

Even Pepper Foster says it's probably not the most likely place to open their first Canadian store.

But the former Winnipeggers, who have carved out a high-end hipster niche in the celebrity fashion world of Los Angeles designing and selling $300 distressed-denim blue jeans and $60 T-shirts, have never really left the region.

They are regulars in an L.A. celebrity streethockey game and count the likes of Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy as their pals.

"People think of us as the American boys from Canada," he said. "We're great ambassadors for Canada and the Lake of the Woods. It's a special place."

Canadian imagery and iconography are all over their growing clothing lines:

"ö Buttons and rivets are engraved with the words "Lake of the Woods".

"ö Jeans are named after Canadian spots like Clearwater, Palmer Rapids, Hundred-Mile House, Brandon, and there's a Flin Flon jacket and Canada Tire chinos.

"ö Their flagship New York store is designed to feel like a log cabin with a huge image of Lake of the Woods on the wall.

So maybe a Kenora store is not so ridiculous?

"It's a crazy idea. It's hilarious," Pepper said this week in an interview from his L.A. home with characteristic Chip and Pepper high-energy charm that just cannot be faked. "The right place (to open a Canadian store) would be a metropolitan city like Winnipeg or Toronto, but this is one of our favourite places. We spent our summers there when we were young. We love it there. We still have a place on Lake of the Woods."

Pepper refers to it as a "pop shop" (it pops up and then shuts down). Scheduled to open by the end of next week on Kenora's Main Street, it will stay open only until shortly after Boxing Day. It was the idea of Kenora photographer and publisher Tom Thomson, who has become friends with the twins after flying to L.A. to shoot them for a feature in his magazine, Kenora Stuff, a few years ago.

"We're going to make some signs for the store that say New York, Newport Beach, Dallas, Kenora," Thomson said in reference to the other locations of Chip and Pepper stores.

Next year, Tokyo and Osaka might have to be added as two new stores are under construction in Japan.

Neither Thomson nor Foster have any expectations for the store other than as a bit of a lark for the Christmas season.

Thomson said it could give the town a bit of holiday cheer after enduring a tough summer of road repairs, resource-industry closings, rising gas prices and an expensive Canadian dollar.

"Main Street is open now, but it had been torn up and it was a mess this year," Thomson said. "I told the boys that it would be great for the town. We need a boost for Main Street."

Pepper said the store will feature much lower prices than the normal $200-plus for the their stylish ripped jeans, which can be found only at their own stores and high-end U.S. chains like Bloomingdale's, Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus.

"We'll do the dollar at par and there will be huge discounts on top of that," Foster said.

The twins left Winnipeg for L.A. in the early '90s to do an animated Saturday-morning cartoon series for NBC. That lasted a year.

They had licensed their clothing brand to a large merchandiser, but it floundered. They got back in the business with a store on L.A.'s Melrose Boulevard, and that morphed into their own denim design line that attracted celebrity customers like Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 29, 2008 B8