ANN LOWE

BRAND AND FASHION DESIGNER ,   L

ANN LOWE WAS AN AFRICAN AMERICAN COUTURIER KNOWN FOR DESIGNING JACQUELINE KENNEDY’S WEDDING DRESS

Ann Lowe in her atelier

The designer Ann Lowe was born in 1898 in Clayton, Alabama, in a family of seamstresses. Her grandmother was made a slave, and her mother was very skilled in embroidering. After the mother’s death, at the age of 16 she completed four prom dresses for the first lady of Alabama. Lowe’s talent was clear to everyone.

In 1917 she moved to  New York to attend a dewing course, and here she started to feel the weight of her origins. Due to racial segregation she was the only black student in the course and also the only one to attend it in a separate room from her peers.

But the mastery with which she created dresses was undeniable, so in 1928 she was accepted at the S. T. Taylor Design School of New York.

THE OPENING OF THE SHOP AND THE FIRST SUCCESSES

In 1950 she opened her first independent business “Ann Lowe’s Gowns“. As she admitted, she didn’t create dresses for anyone, only for the most important people. In fact, Lowe immediately became famous among the rich American élite for her unique dresses created with refined fabrics with floreal motifs. During her career she made dresses for the Rockfellers, the Roosvelts, and the Du Ponts, and also for important stores like Neiman Marcus and Saks.

JACKIE KENNEDY’S WEDDING DRESS

While she struggled to make room among the American élite, Lowe was called by the mother of the future first lady Jacqueline Lee Bouvier to create the wedding dress of her daughter for the wedding with Kennedy. An aesthetic decision as much as a political one. Kennedy was a civil rights activist, so Lowe was the perfect candidate to design his future wife’s wedding dress. However, Jackie hated the model of the dress designed for her and said it would make her look like “a lampshade”. She was only allowed a few changes to some details to make it more in accordance with her wishes.

The dress designed by Ann Lowe consisted of a silk taffeta skirt, embellished with wide circles of intertwined ribbons and a fitted bodice with an off-the-shoulder neckline. On the head, Jackie’s grandmother’s veil decorated with Venetian lace. We don’t know if this was Lowe’s original idea. In fact, ten days before the wedding, a flood in the tailor’s shop destroyed the bridesmaids’ dresses and even the wedding dress. Ann and her staff worked day and night to remedy the misdeed, but she suffered a $2,000 loss.

Despite everything, the success of the dress was unprecedented and the day after the wedding it was on all the newspaper covers. Everyone wanted to know the name behind the sumptuous dress, but in an interview, Jackie absently replied: “a black seamstress did it”. The journalists of the time revealed every detail of the dress and wedding, but there was no trace of Ann Lowe’s name.

The Saturday Evening Post defined her as ”society’s best kept secret”. Yet, Lowe had just become the first black designer to create a wedding dress for a future first lady.

It is said that in the last years of her career she has a conspicuous debt, suddenly paid by a mysterious benefactor. Some think that it was Jackie herself, as a sign of gratitude. Ann Lowe’s career ended in 1972, and she died on the 25th of February 1981.

Jackie Kennedy wedding dress

ANN LOW’S LEGACY

Her dresses are kept in important museum collections, among which the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of the City of New York. Her dresses were the protagonists of the exhibition organized at The Museum at FIT The Museum at FIT of 2017 entitled “Black Fashion Designers“