The Hundred Dresses, Erin McKean

Donna Mehalko, The Breakfast at Tiffany's, 2013

(July 24) I already like the author and have followed her blog A Dress a Day for years, because she talks very entertainingly about dresses, and it’s a huge subject. There’s a lot of interesting engineering and physics in the making and wearing of dresses, not to mention the fascinating threads of history, philosophy, cultural anthropology and art woven into them.

A Dress a Day hits all those notes and more, just as you might expect from a lexicographer, and is by times funny, uplifting, poignant and wise, just as you do expect from a good writer.

This book gives McKean a chance to talk about dresses in terms of a Big Theme, and she does make the most of it. At first, you might think there can’t be 100 different modern dresses, and even if you created such a listicle you'd swear there couldn’t be a great deal one could say about each them, but very soon you realize McKean had to leave out many iconic dresses and you wish she'd had room to go on and on about some of them.

I liked the book because McKean is an entertaining writer, but I probably really liked it because it is a species of feminist manifesto: “Here are 100 different kinds of interesting women and what they wanted to think and do... and, oh, yeah, btw, here’s what they wore.” It is much more than a look at fashion.

The illustrations by Donna Mehalko are amazing -- she nails the essence of each dress with just a few spare strokes.