Centerstage - Chicago's Original City Guide

Articles Sections >> Arts + Words Bars + Clubs Dating Festivals Fitness Food Lifestyle Music Theater Travel + Tourism Who's Who > View All Arts and Words Food and Drink Music

Erin McKean blogs about the secret lives of dresses, the culture of craft and technology.

Monday Nov 27, 2006.     By Jessica Herman

Who's Who Feed

Infatuated with the idea of the dress, 35-year-old Erin McKean started her blog Dress A Day in 2005. From writing about dresses in literature and poems to posting her own fictional series "The Secret Lives of Dresses" (stories from the perspective of a dress), to fabrics, sewing processes and more, Erin uses the dress and the culture of craft as a gateway into discussing various forms of technology with women as well as the tireless topic of feminism.

"Its hundreds of years old, and yet we still find new ones all the time," she says of her subject. Nonetheless, Erin leans towards the vintage end of the spectrum, and you're likely to find pictures of mid-century styles, in pictures or patterns, during any given week.

Proudly reporting 3,000 hits per day, she says that one of her favorite parts of Dress A Day is the advice her readers dole out regularly to other readers on topics such as fitting and fashion. Apparently she's not the only one who's sweet on dress style.

What's the gist of your blog?
Basically it's a dress every day.

If I read your blog today, gimme me one thing I'd learn.
How different little girls clothes are now than they used to be…When I was 11, I would have loved to have a dress like [some of the ones I feature].

How do you pay the bills?
I'm the editor-in-chief of the Oxford American Dictionary. (She also writes articles about the science of lexicography and edits a word-nerd quarterly called Verbatim.)

Your computer is surrounded by…
Which one? I'm kind of flip-flopping between a G4 and a new Mac Book now. They're surrounded by notes and a timer (for following the Merlin Mann Method), some recent academic papers on lexicography, my notebook and a [DIY] day planner.

When you aren't loving blogging, you're loving BLANK in Chicago:
I love everything about Chicago. I like to go thrift store shopping. I like to roller skate in Skokie's sculpture garden. I like to make excuses to go to Michigan Avenue to go to Wow Bao in the Water Tower. I like to buy fabric at Vogue Fabrics in Evanston. I like the Regenstein Library in Hyde Park.

Name a local blogger extraordinaire.
I have to say Poundy. And I like the The Sewist, too.

Jessica Herman likes peeking into other folks' lives, which sure helps when she's grilling hip Chicago bloggers. If you'd like to shower a little love on a local blogger whose antics and anecdotes are your favorite flavor of procrastination, shoot her an email.