Ann Lowe: High Society’s Unknown Dressmaker
Ann Lowe created one of the most famous wedding dresses of the 20th century, but it would be years before her work was acknowledged.
Lowe, a Black couturier from Clayton, Alabama, designed the wedding dress that Jacqueline Bouvier wore to her 1953 wedding to then-Senator John F. Kennedy. The wedding of the future First Lady and President was widely covered in the press, yet Lowe was not mentioned by name. Much was made of the fact that the dress had been designed by an American designer, yet the fact that the designer was Black was mostly shielded in secrecy.
Ironically, Lowe, then 54 years old, was already known among society insiders, creating wedding gowns, debutante dresses, and formal wear for wealthy women. Not being identified as the designer of Bouvier’s dress cost her an untold amount in lost publicity. What should have been a career-defining moment for Lowe was instead a venture that ended up not only in anonymity but putting her in the red. A week and a half before the September 12th wedding, there was a flood in Lowe’s studio, ruining 10 of the 15 dresses that had been commissioned for the big day.
LOST OPPORTUNITY
Among the casualties was the bridal gown. Seeing no alternative, Lowe and her staff re-created the 10 dresses in 10 days – an extraordinary feat, given that the original gown itself had been worked on for 2 months. A reproduction of the dress, created for a show highlighting Lowe’s work at Winterthur Museum, took 200 hours to make. Lowe kept the news of the flood to herself and absorbed the cost of re-creating the ruined dresses.
Both doing the unimaginable and being treated less than fairly were familiar territory for Lowe. She started sewing as a young girl, inspired by the work of her mother and grandmother, both respected local dressmakers. Married at 14 and a mother at 15, Lowe took over the family dressmaking business at 16, when her mother died unexpectedly. Lowe’s mother had left four dresses unfinished for Alabama’s first lady, Elizabeth Kirkman O’Neal. Lowe went to Montgomery and completed the ballgowns. The work left her feeling “there was nothing I couldn’t do when it came to sewing.”
She moved to Tampa for several years to become a private dressmaker for a wealthy family, leaving her husband and taking her son with her. In 1920, she married again, establishing her own business first in Tampa and then in New York City in 1928. Lowe would spend the next 44 years creating clothes, both for other fashion houses and under her own labels.
By the early ‘50s, Lowe had established a fashion house under her own name, on Madison Avenue. She was the first Black designer to have a shop on the prestigious street. Her dresses were worn by socialites and Hollywood stars (actress Olivia de Havilland accepted her first Oscar in one of Lowe’s creations), admired by such fashion luminaries as Edith Head and Christian Dior, and adorned the pages of Vogue.
A talented designer and dressmaker, Lowe seemingly had little business or financial acumen. She repeatedly fell into financial difficulty, stemming in part from her undercharging clients. When a business partnership dissolved in 1953, she brought her son, Arthur Lee, into the business to help manage the business. His death in 1958 left her bereft and without a steady, trusted partner whose business skills complemented her artistic ones. In 1960, she closed her business and went to work for Saks Fifth Avenue.
In 1964 – fifty years after she completed her mother’s unfinished work – Lowe finally got the broader recognition that had long eluded her. She was featured in The Saturday Evening Post, who called her “Society’s Best-Kept Secret.” Rather than bristle at what could be construed as a left-handed compliment, Lowe leveraged it as branding, emphasizing the exclusive nature of her couture and her clients. Successful cataract surgery allowed her to work, and she again went out on her own. She retired in 1972 and died in 1981.
LOWE’S LEGACY
Lowe’s legacy as a designer is difficult to pin down. Her craftsmanship, attention to detail, and innovative ways of constructing a garment are unimpeachable, but she was more inclined to follow the prevailing trends of fashion than to set out in a new direction. But that may not have been her ambition. She revealed to television talk show host Mike Douglas that what inspired her was “to prove that a Negro can become a major dress designer.” From that perspective, her legacy becomes clearer.
As Elizabeth Way wrote in Ann Lowe, American Couturier, “McGee, Barrie, Smith, Jaxon, and Kelly may or may not have known of Lowe, but her career – her attendance at a New York City fashion school, her relationships suppliers and buyers, her prominent list of clients, and the press she received – all helped normalize the idea that a black person could be a talented and important fashion designer.”
Without Ann Lowe, would there have been a Willi Smith, a Patrick Kelly, a Stephen Burrows, or a Jax Jaxon, Black designers who shot to prominence in the ‘70s? Ethiopian-American Aberra Amsale’s couture bridal boutique harkens back to Lowe’s own time on Madison Avenue.
More contemporary Black designers include Dapper Dan, Anifa Mvuemba, Aurora James, LaQuan Smith, Kimora Lee Simmons , (who relaunched her millennial brand, Baby Phat, in 2023) and Telfar Clemens. Rihanna, Kanye West, Pharrell Williams, and Tyler the Creator are among the musicians and singers who have found great success in the fashion world.
Indeed, they have all found the visibility that Lowe herself craved and rarely received in her lifetime. Late in her career, she attended for the first time an event for which she had designed a dress. Said Lowe that night, “For all of my life, ever since I was a little girl, I thought what I wanted was to be at one of these lovely dinner dances. Well. Now that I'm here, it’s been marvelous, but I know that the main thing about this is not the dinner and it's not the fashion show, it's that I know that you see me. You see what I've tried to do all of these years.”
