- 1898 (MDCCCXCVIII)
- 1981 (MCMLXXXI)
- African American
- Ann Lowe’s Gowns, Saks Fifth Avenue (custom)
- •Jackie Kennedy’s wedding dress (1953)
- •Olivia de Havilland’s Oscar dress (1947)
- •Society bridal couture
- •Uncredited for decades
Ann Lowe
The Alabama-born Black couturier who made Jackie Kennedy’s 1953 wedding dress — and whom the First Lady, for decades, declined to credit by name.
Ann Cole Lowe was born in 1898 in Clayton, Alabama, the great-granddaughter of an enslaved seamstress and the daughter of a dressmaker. Her grandmother, mother, and aunts had, since the 1870s, sewn the ball gowns for Alabama's white plantation-class social calendar. Ann learned, accordingly, from childhood.
The Education
She moved to Tampa with her first husband, opened a dressmaking studio, and in 1917 was accepted at the S.T. Taylor Design School in New York. The school was segregated; Lowe was required to sit and work in a separate room from her white classmates. She graduated in 1919, moved to Tampa again, then returned to New York in 1928 to establish her own atelier.
The Kennedy Wedding
On 12 September 1953, Jacqueline Bouvier married Senator John F. Kennedy in Newport, Rhode Island. The bride's dress — a fifty-yard ivory silk taffeta portrait-collar gown with rosettes and a full skirt — had been made by Ann Lowe over two months in her Madison Avenue atelier. Ten days before the wedding, a water pipe burst in the studio and destroyed the finished dress and the fifteen bridesmaids' gowns. Lowe personally financed the remake, drawing on her life savings, rather than miss the deadline.
When Jacqueline Kennedy was asked, at a post-wedding press event, who had designed the dress, she answered: "A colored woman dressmaker, not the haute couture." Lowe was not named in any press account of the dress for the next fifty-five years. She was formally credited, in The New York Times, in 2008.
I love my clothes and I'm particular about who wears them. I'm not interested in sewing for — I don't know — café society and social climbers. — Ann Lowe
The Work
She also designed Olivia de Havilland's dress for the 1947 Academy Awards (at which de Havilland won Best Actress for To Each His Own), and, over four decades, the wedding, debutante, and society dresses of the Rockefellers, DuPonts, Lodges, Whitneys, and Auchinclosses.
The Last Years
Lowe lost the sight in her right eye to glaucoma in 1963 and in her left eye to a cataract in 1969. She continued to sew by memory with the help of her assistant. She was forced into bankruptcy by an IRS debt in the 1960s; Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis paid the debt anonymously. Lowe died in Queens, New York, in 1981. The 2023 monograph Ann Lowe: American Couturier by the Winterthur Museum has, with the Met's 2023 exhibition Women Dressing Women, restored her to the canon she made.
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