Edna Marie Dunn

Edna Marie Dunn was a prolific fashion illustrator whose designs were featured in The Kansas City Star for more than forty years. She educated hundreds of students at the Edna Marie Dunn School of Fashion in Kansas City's Midtown district.

Edna Marie Dunn was born on April 18, 1983, in Chicago, Illinois. Her father was a doctor who loved to paint, inspiring her early interest in art. Dunn began sewing her own clothes at age sixteen, while attending Westport High School in Kansas City, Missouri. She decided to pursue a career as a fashion illustrator after attending Christian College in Columbia, Missouri, and the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts.

Edna Marie Dunn first worked freelance, illustrating ads for Kansas City department stores including Harzfeld's, Woolf Brothers, Rothschild's, and Emery, Bird, & Thayer. In 1922 she won an art competition that earned her a job as fashion illustrator at The Kansas City Star, where she worked until 1964. Drawn directly from Kansas City storefronts, her illustrations documented decades of the city's leading fashions. Today, hundreds are preserved in the Star's digital archives.

Between 1932 and 1961, Dunn published quilt patterns in The Kansas City Star with fellow artists Eveline Foland and Ruby Short McKim. The weekly column responded to a time when many women had to learn to sew owing to war shortages and the Great Depression. Many of the free quilt block patterns published were submitted by anonymous readers, artifacts of family traditions. The "Star Quilts" experienced a revival in the 1990s, and have since been collected and exhibited widely across the country. 

In 1937, Dunn opened the Edna Marie Dunn School of Fashion from her home at 3820 Main St. The garment industry in Kansas City had rapidly expanded during the 1930s, with eighty-one local companies and more than eight thousand employees. Dunn prepared students for fashion careers with classes in sewing, pattern design, and illustration.

Edna Marie Dunn was active in the local fashion community with other artists such as Fanny Fern Fitzwater, Nell Snead and Patricia George. She was a founder of the Kansas City Fashion Group, dedicated to promoting the city's fashion industry. She organized exhibitions of commercial artists and fashion designers at her studio and other local galleries.

In addition to fashion illustration, Edna Marie Dunn ran a business selling unique, hand-drawn holiday cards. After her retirement in 1969, she continued illustrating freelance for the next decade, until her death on June 20, 1983.