What Jessica Wore WRITTEN BY
Kay len Ralp h
| PHOTOGRAPHY BY
Ada m Quirk
On May 5, 2007, Jessica Schroeder (now Quirk) snapped her first daily outfit photo. She began cataloguing them on her Tumblr “What I Wore” in early 2008. Now, three years and over a thousand photos later, Jessica has become one of the queen bees of a rising new class in fashion: the personal style bloggers.
She and her contemporaries have filled in the holes left by the iconic glossies we can’t get enough of but sometimes just need a little more personality (and practicality) from. These bloggers are being asked to cover Fashion Week (as Jessica did for Tumblr in February of this year), and even if they’re not sitting next to Anna Wintour, they’re disseminating the new trends to thousands of young women long before their print counterparts 120
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make it on the shelves. A Midwestern girl at heart, Jessica graduated from Indiana University in Bloomington with a degree in apparel merchandising and a minor in marketing. The marketing has played a major role in the success of her blog, which she decided to monetize and make her fulltime job in 2009. She now has a regular audience of approximately
10,000 readers a day and her new book, What I Wore: Four Seasons, One Closet, Endless Recipes for Personal Style, came out in July to favorable acclaim. Splitting time between Bloomington and New York City, Jessica has made a thriving career using a platform that hadn’t even been created at the time she was thinking up her dream jobs. Innovative, stylish, inspiring, digital…sounds like Matchbook girl.