From The Sydney Morning Herald, Leesha McKenny writes: ‘Fictional fashion forecaster Michi Girl thrives on sass and sun.”

“Michi is a single, twentysomething Melbournite who, as a forecaster of fashion and weather, has made it her business to know when shop assistants can smell fear (at 20 paces) and when it’s appropriate to wear trackpants in public (never).

If you fancy asking how she started out, how you pronounce her name or whether you’ll need a jacket today, best ask Chloe Quigley or Daniel Pollock. They invented her.

“I gave a talk last year at a design festival and it was to a full auditorium of people, and so many people’s faces dropped when they realised that she wasn’t real,” Quigley says. “They said it was sort of like the bubble’s burst.”

But it hasn’t. Not for Michi and certainly not for the two advertising professionals who gave their creation a cat, a sister and enough sass to stock a daily email newsletter, a newspaper column, and now, a book.

Michi’s Like I Give a Frock, a do-and-don’t guide (with an emphasis on the “don’t”) to fashion, is the ultimate vindication of anyone who has ever been told that bludgy emails between bored work colleagues never amount to anything.

Pollock says the idea of Michi (pronounced Mit-chee) started about seven years ago while they were both freelancing at an advertising agency.

Initially, “Michi’s” emails covered whether the weather looked good (”it was actually whether we’d go to work or not,” Quigley says), and grew to include a couple of comments about what you should wear to the beach, before developing into a daily online newsletter featuring a fashion product and short commentary that reached in-boxes each afternoon.

“We had the idea for a really basic site and we sent it out to five or six friends on the first day and we haven’t really touched it since . . . it’s kind of grown from there,” he says.

So much so that they no longer need to compare notes before composing a Michi missive; she is the point where their two personalities meet.

….  ”Michi is a semi-professional weather girl, and the weather is something that definitely affects her personality daily, and so we thought we’d expand that idea and look at it from a seasonal point of view.”

The pair admit the focus on how the weather informs what you wear (and how you feel) might be a particularly Melbourne trait but it doesn’t limit the appeal for their international subscribers. “I think the nice thing about Michi is that everyone to a degree is interested in the weather and everyone who is interested in clothes is interested in the weather,” Quigley says. “If you care about clothes and what you put on that day, then you have to care about the weather.”

“Like I Give A Frock by Michi Girl is published by Viking.

Photo from The Design Files.