In 1953, Jacqueline Lee Bouvier married John Fitzgerald Kennedy in one of those “weddings of the century” that seem to occur every few years. She was a twenty-four-year-old former débutante, who had been working for a Washington newspaper as an “Inquiring Camera Girl” while prospecting for a husband. He was a freshman senator from Massachusetts with his eyes on the White House. But you know all that, and what ensued. You may even recall the pictures of Jackie’s dress—one of the most photographed bridal gowns in history.
Jackie was the architect of her own myth, and pretty much everything she wore after her marriage was chosen to enhance it. Her Gallic ancestry, embellished in the retelling, was a central motif. In that regard, her wedding gown was a disappointment to her. According to Kennedy historians, the young Miss Bouvier had lobbied for something svelte and Parisian. But Joseph Kennedy, the groom’s father and impresario, overruled her. He was wary of sending the wrong message: decadent foreign glamour.
The dress that Jackie got was a chaste confection of ivory silk taffeta with a portrait neckline, a daintily tucked bodice, and a parasol skirt appliquéd with frilly rosettes. She wore it with regal aplomb, though her pique may have simmered. In 1961, Mrs. Kennedy’s first year in the White House, a writer who interviewed her for the Ladies’ Home Journal reported that the gown had been made by “a colored woman dressmaker” and was “not the haute couture.”
That “colored woman dressmaker,” Ann Lowe, was in fact a consummate couturier. Her work was admired by Christian Dior and by the legendary costumer Edith Head. Jackie’s formidable mother, Janet Auchincloss, was a faithful client. Jackie and her sister, Lee, had both made their Newport débuts in a Lowe dress. Marjorie Merriweather Post, the heiress and philanthropist (Donald Trump bought Mar-a-Lago from her estate), chose a silk-faille robe de style, attributed to Lowe, for her portrait by an artist who had painted Queen Elizabeth. Olivia de Havilland accepted her first Oscar in a strapless Lowe number of aqua tulle lavished with hand-painted flowers. Jessica Regan, an associate curator at the Met Costume Institute, compares Lowe to Mainbocher: “She was a brilliant example of the American couture tradition—a sculptural designer whose work was a dialogue with the body of the woman who wore it.”
Lowe’s evening and bridal wear were sold coast to coast in upscale department stores. She owned salons at several locations on Madison Avenue. In her heyday, the mid-fifties, she claimed that she sold a thousand gowns a year, grossing three hundred thousand dollars. (Her math tends to be inflected by hyperbole. Each gown was an original that required hours of intensive labor; Balenciaga, by comparison, produced about three hundred pieces of couture annually.)
Yet Lowe commuted to the Upper East Side from a ground-floor apartment in Harlem that she shared with her sister Sallie, who did the cooking. The same millionaires who cherished the finesse of her needlework haggled shamelessly over her prices, and she routinely undercharged them, explaining in interviews that the sheer happiness sewing brought her was its own reward. Retailers profited from her label’s cachet but didn’t advance the costs of her materials or her labor, and the debts she incurred to suppliers helped ruin her. (She was ruined several times, but staged more comebacks than Muhammad Ali.) The Kennedy wedding, for which Lowe also dressed the bridesmaids, was a notable debacle for her. A plumbing disaster in her studio destroyed the gowns shortly before the event; toiling sleeplessly, she re-created them at her own expense. She never complained to the family. She did, however, indignantly refuse to use the service entrance at the Auchincloss farm, threatening to take her work back to New York if it and she weren’t ushered through the front door.
In 2007, a retired biology teacher from Washington, D.C., Joyce Bailey, made a landmark bequest to the recently established National Museum of African American History and Culture. Bailey’s glamorous mother, Lois K. Alexander Lane, is a singular figure in the history of Black fashion. Born in Little Rock in 1916, she dreamed of becoming a designer, but spent most of her life working for the federal government. On the side, she founded a school in Harlem that offered classes in dressmaking and millinery. In 1979, she opened the Black Fashion Museum, in a brownstone on 126th Street, a few blocks from Lowe’s apartment.
Lane spent decades building the museum’s archives. By the time her daughter donated them to the N.M.A.A.H.C., they contained about two thousand garments designed, fabricated, or worn by African-Americans. The earliest artifacts—a muslin dress, a bonnet—were the handiwork of enslaved women. But Lane also collected the showstopping outfits that Zelda Wynn Valdes created for such stars as Ella Fitzgerald; Geoffrey Holder’s costumes for “The Wiz”; and the drab-chic day wear of Arthur McGee, a dressmaker’s son, who was the first Black designer to run a studio on Seventh Avenue. In Lane’s collection, a simple rayon dress that Rosa Parks had been sewing for herself when she refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery shared pride of place with the opulent ball gowns of Ann Lowe. “Lane had done something that the great costume collections in the United States had not,” Robin Givhan wrote, in the Washington Post. “She focused on storytelling”—the stories that clothes tell of pride and hardship, triumph and endurance.
Lowe’s rediscovery is due largely to the work of Black fashion scholars and curators, beginning with Lane, and including, more recently, Elaine Nichols, of the N.M.A.A.H.C.; Elizabeth Way, of the Fashion Institute of Technology; and Margaret Powell, a textile historian from Pittsburgh. A draft of Powell’s master’s thesis on Lowe was published online, in 2012, by the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design, and she was working on a full-scale biography when she died of cancer, at forty-three, two years ago.
Despite assiduous research, however, much of what is known about Lowe’s life—especially her youth—comes from interviews that she gave as an elderly woman. One can’t discount her lapses of memory, or her genius for embellishment. But one also can’t discount the paucity of public records documenting the births, marriages, and deaths of African-Americans, not to mention their accomplishments. Several dozen of Lowe’s dresses have been lovingly preserved—out of thousands. The fabric of her biography is an imperfect patchwork.
According to her own chronology, Lowe was born in Clayton, Alabama, in 1898. In the census of 1910, however, she figures as a married woman of twenty-one, living with her first husband, Lee Cone (his name has ubiquitously been reported as “Cohen”), a tailor, in the town of Dothan, about fifty miles from her birthplace.
Clayton is the seat of Barbour County, a center of plantation culture before the Civil War. A Confederate monument still stands in the courthouse square. George Wallace, the infamous segregationist, and his wife, Lurleen, who succeeded him as governor of Alabama, raised their family in Clayton, and racial strife has a long history there. On Election Day, 1874, a white-supremacist mob carried out a violent coup in Barbour. Its members murdered at least seven Black voters, and wounded scores, while routing hundreds of others at their polling places. Having destroyed ballots already cast, the insurrectionists unseated a Reconstruction judge duly elected by a majority of Alabamians—many of them free men of color.
One of those men was Lowe’s grandfather General Cole (“General” was his given name, not a rank), a carpenter who had helped build the original Clayton courthouse. Around 1860, Cole bought the freedom of his wife, a young woman of mixed race: Georgia Thompkins, or Tompkins—Lowe’s grandmother. Georgia’s father owned the plantation where she and her enslaved mother worked as seamstresses.
Lowe’s mother, Jane, was born during the Civil War. At some point during Reconstruction, she met Ann’s father, Jack Lowe, of whom nothing is known. But by the beginning of the twentieth century Jane and Georgia had established themselves as society dressmakers in Montgomery, the state capital, catering to political wives and daughters. Ann’s education in the segregated schools of Alabama would have been rudimentary, and she dropped out at fourteen. But her apprenticeship in the family business trained her for one of the few vocations by which a woman could support herself respectably. It also gave her a rare example of female autonomy.
Lowe’s driving ambition, she told Mike Douglas, as a guest on his talk show in 1964, was “to prove that a Negro can become a major dress designer.” She cut the figure of one, birdlike and soignée. Her uniform was an exquisitely severe black suit or dress, accessorized by a trademark hat, a taut chignon, red lipstick, and dark glasses. By then, Lowe was the tenacious survivor of a game in which most contestants get thrown off the island. Who now remembers Gustave Beer, a contemporary of Charles Frederick Worth? What about posh Carolyne Roehm, a fixture of the Reagan era? Does Bill Gaytten ring a bell? (He briefly replaced John Galliano at Dior.)
From early childhood, Lowe possessed a transcendent self-confidence in her gifts. At five or six, she had started turning scraps of silk into the trompe-l’oeil flowers that became her signature as a couturier. Her husband, she said, forbade her to work—he wanted a stay-at-home wife—and she obeyed him for a while. But when her mother died, in 1914, Ann was recalled to Montgomery to finish four ball gowns for Alabama’s First Lady, Elizabeth Kirkman O’Neal. It was, Lowe said, “my first big test in life,” and it inspired her to feel that “there was nothing I couldn’t do when it came to sewing.”
Within two years, Lowe’s life was transformed by a chance encounter at a Dothan department store. An out-of-town shopper noticed Lowe’s clothes and remarked that she had “never seen a colored girl so well dressed.” That lady, Josephine Lee, the wife of a wealthy citrus grower from Tampa, had four daughters, the eldest of whom were twins engaged to be married. She offered Lowe a job as her live-in dressmaker, initially to create gowns for the wedding party. Lowe, who had recently given birth to a son, Arthur, ditched her husband and leaped at the opportunity: “I picked up my baby and got on that Tampa train.”
Lowe recalled her years in Tampa as the happiest of her life. The local press celebrated her work in its accounts of weddings and galas. An “Annie Cone” dress was a status symbol. Jessica Regan noted that Lowe became famous for her surface embellishments—“for tiny carnations with organza petals, each one minutely hand-finished. But the interior structure of a dress was just as important to her. Invisible tacking stitches keep the layers of fabric moving together; a lightly boned bodice holds the bosom stable on a dance floor. Her emphasis on a perfected fit made her clients feel secure.”
That security was a luxury that Lowe herself couldn’t enjoy. She raised her son as a single mother in the Jim Crow South. They lived in the staff quarters of a rich man’s house. Its owners were “sincere” with her, Lowe later recalled, yet she had to navigate boundaries of race and class that neither talent nor affection could breach. As Elaine Nichols noted in a recent e-mail to me, Lowe was “helping young, wealthy white women (and their parents) live in a world of fantasy.” In that respect, she belongs to a tradition of African-American dressmaking that stretches back before the Civil War. “A dressmaker, in some senses, is a body servant,” Elizabeth Way observed. “She works on her knees.”
Michelle Obama was the first chatelaine of the White House to champion the work of Black designers—Tracy Reese, Laura Smalls, Duro Olowu, Byron Lars, Mimi Plange, and Maki Oh, among others. But she wasn’t the first to wear them. Women of color have been dressing First Ladies at least since 1861, when Mary Todd Lincoln hired Elizabeth Keckley as her personal “modiste.”
Keckley was born on a Virginia plantation in 1818. Her father, Armistead Burwell, was its owner. She and her mother, a skilled seamstress, were his house slaves. For three decades, she endured a life of violence and degradation. Burwell “loaned” her to his son Robert (a minister), and when Keckley was eighteen one of Robert’s parishioners took it upon himself to “subdue” the girl’s “stubborn pride” with a whip. Later, she fell prey to a local shop owner, who raped her for four years. A son, George, was born of those assaults; he would die as a Union soldier.
In 1847, Keckley and George were transported to St. Louis, Missouri, by her white half sister and new mistress, Anne Garland. As the Garlands’ fortunes dissipated, they hired “Lizzie” out to sew for ladies of their acquaintance. A few of those ladies grew fond of Keckley, and loaned her the price of her freedom. Her artfulness as a couturier, however, had increased her value as a piece of property. The Garlands demanded twelve hundred dollars for mother and son. (Abraham Lincoln and his wife had recently paid that sum for a house in Illinois.)
Once she was a free woman, Keckley sent George to Wilberforce University, in Ohio, a historically Black institution, where she herself later taught domestic arts. In 1860, she settled in Washington, D.C., and established a dressmaking business, with a bipartisan clientele that included the wives of Stephen A. Douglas, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis. A daughter of Edwin Sumner, the Union general, arranged the job interview with Mrs. Lincoln.
Mary Lincoln, like Jackie, was a Francophile and a clotheshorse. Her extravagance was notorious. Unlike Jackie, she had a dumpy figure and pretentious taste. (Her sartorial ideal was the Empress Eugénie.) Keckley dressed her with an elegance befitting her station—and her self-importance—but toned down the flamboyance. Volatile women are an occupational hazard of the fashion business, not to say of the plantation house. Stoical, reserved Mrs. Keckley had a gift for talking Mary Lincoln through her bouts of outrage and depression. And when the Lincolns lost their son Willie, at eleven, to typhoid, months after Keckley’s son was killed on the battlefield, the two women grieved together.
That companionship, however, had a bitter aftermath. In 1867, the widow Lincoln, short of funds, decided to sell her luxurious White House wardrobe. Keckley travelled to New York to help with the sale. No buyers were found, and their foray was derided in the press. The next year, Keckley donated a trove of Lincoln memorabilia to Wilberforce, including the bloodstained bonnet that Mary had worn to Ford’s Theatre. Her gift infuriated the former First Lady, who had wanted the items back. But the worst affront came several months later, when Keckley, seeking in part to raise sympathy for Mrs. Lincoln, published a memoir with the sensational title “Behind the Scenes, Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House.” The condemnation it received, especially from the Lincoln family, effectively ended a career that depended on deference and discretion.
Elizabeth Way, who wrote a master’s thesis on Keckley and Lowe, was struck by their similarities, she told me. “Their skills were inherited from enslaved ancestors, and they both transformed them into free labor. More remarkably, they were able to build a client network of élite white women who came to respect their professional authority. Lowe represents a transitional figure in fashion history—a bridge between the old-fashioned artisan that Keckley was and the modern designer.”
The American South has never been a bastion of modernity in fashion. Even in the North, chic women of Lowe’s generation—and of Jackie’s—looked to Paris. When Lowe began her career, designer ready-to-wear was five decades away. Mrs. Lee, however, realized that Lowe had the potential to create sophisticated haute couture—at down-home prices. In 1917, the family sponsored her enrollment in an established dressmaking school, S. T. Taylor, on lower Broadway, in Manhattan.
Nearly every American designer of the past century gravitated to New York, the capital of self-invention. It was a magnet for Lowe, too. She was unprepared, however, for the prejudice she encountered among Northerners. “The whole idea to admit a Negro girl to a high-class fashion school was absurd,” she told a journalist in 1966. The school’s director, who was French, “didn’t believe I had the $1,500 for the course—he just laughed. When I showed him my bankbook, he stopped laughing, but he still didn’t believe that I could learn what he was teaching there.” Here one should note that Harvard’s tuition, at the time, was a hundred and fifty dollars, and that S. T. Taylor, according to Margaret Powell, advertised its courses in the Crisis, the N.A.A.C.P. magazine. It is entirely plausible, though, that Lowe’s fellow-students snubbed her—until they were humbled by her virtuosity. She left after a few months, when the dazzled Frenchman acknowledged that there was nothing he could teach her.
Lowe spent the next decade in Tampa. In 1919, she married a hotel bellman named Caleb West, and launched her own business in a workroom behind their house. She trained a staff in her exacting techniques of hand beading and trapunto (a style of quilting that creates an intricate raised design), and some of her protégées went on to prosper independently. Lowe’s most treasured creations from that era were her fancy-dress costumes for Gasparilla, a local festival with parties and parades akin to Mardi Gras. The revels included a themed ball; they were dogged by charges of racism until the nineties.
One of the earliest Lowes to have survived, a short flapper-style dress from 1926, is the costume for a Gasparilla courtier that might have come from les petites mains of Lesage. “The asymmetrical neckline has one jeweled shoulder strap,” Powell writes. “A large jeweled medallion in the upper left of the bodice and a series of small medallions towards the bottom of the skirt are connected with sprays of brilliants . . . in a pattern reminiscent of tree branches or curling smoke.” The cloth has decayed, but the embellishment is intact. Each tiny bead was attached individually.
Lowe may have distinguished herself in the South, but she was also stymied there. Her white competitors had an insuperable advantage, Powell writes. A Black dressmaker could not get credit or rent a workspace in the downtown business district; her clients had to visit her in a segregated neighborhood. Josephine Lee, for one, felt that Lowe was “too good to waste herself” in a provincial backwater.
By 1928, Lowe had moved to New York with several assistants and rented a third-floor studio on West Forty-sixth Street. “No one flocked in,” she told the Daily News, in 1965. “I kept afloat for a whole year making the wedding gown and trousseau for Carlotta Cuesta”—a former Gasparilla queen. In the early months of the Depression, Lowe went looking for a job in the garment district. (She claimed to have started her new business with twenty thousand dollars in seed capital, although that figure, more than ten times the average family’s annual income at the time, should probably be adjusted for exaggeration.) According to the census of 1930, Lowe was sharing her two-bedroom apartment on Manhattan Avenue with her husband, her son, her assistants, and “a roomer.” The marriage didn’t endure. Lowe told Ebony that Caleb West “wanted a real wife,” so he divorced her.
When no one hired Lowe, she offered to make gowns on spec. Her work, as usual, found appreciative buyers. For the next decade, she freelanced anonymously for carriage-trade houses such as Sonia Gowns and Hattie Carnegie. Eventually, she said, she met “the right people.” By then, she was using her maiden name. One of the earliest garments with an “Ann Lowe” label is now at the Met Costume Institute: a sublime wedding dress from 1941, with the silhouette of an Erté Tanagra. Embroidered trapunto lilies, bedewed with seed pearls, cascade down the bodice; molten satin bubbles at the hem like a pool of candle wax.
Some of the greatest designers have been hopeless with money. Paul Poiret and Charles James both died destitute. Yves Saint Laurent was a financial imbecile, but his partner, Pierre Bergé, managed their fortune cannily. Lowe never had a Bergé, not to mention a yacht, a country house, or an art collection—common perks of success in fashion. Her son, Arthur, kept her books and paid the bills. But after his premature death, in a car accident, no one capable took over. In 1962, the Internal Revenue Service shuttered Lowe’s salon for nonpayment of taxes.
The timing was ironic, since the new First Lady’s patronage, or even a public acknowledgment, might have rescued Lowe. But Jackie’s reported slight was more painful to her than any lost business, and she registered her chagrin in a letter of heartbreaking dignity. “My reason for writing this note is to tell you how hurt I feel,” she wrote. “You know I have never sought publicity but I would prefer to be referred to as a ‘noted negro designer,’ which in every sense I am. . . . Any reference to the contrary hurts me more deeply than I can perhaps make you realise.”
Letitia Baldrige, Jackie’s social secretary, called a few days later to assure Lowe that the reference to “a colored woman dressmaker” hadn’t been approved by Mrs. Kennedy, and to convey an apology for her distress—without, however, taking responsibility for it. Lowe then engaged an attorney and sought “tangible” redress from the Ladies’ Home Journal, in the form of a story about her career. The magazine never obliged, but Jackie may have tried to make amends. A year later, one of Lowe’s eyes was removed—it had been irreparably damaged by glaucoma. While she was in the hospital, someone paid off her debts to the I.R.S. Lowe always believed that the First Lady was her anonymous benefactor.
Lowe’s misfortunes of the early sixties nearly crushed her. “I almost gave up dreaming about beauty and thought only of suicide,” she told the Daily News. Saks offered her a workroom and a title—the head designer of its Adam Room, creating bridal and début gowns. She brought Saks her clients, and it touted her collaboration. But Lowe agreed to a disastrous deal: she had to buy her own materials and pay her own staff. “I didn’t realize until too late,” she said, “that on dresses I was getting $300 for, I had put about $450 into it.”
Overwhelmed by debt, Lowe was forced to declare bankruptcy. She went to work for a small custom shop, Madeleine Couture, until cataracts blinded her other eye. In 1964, she underwent a risky operation to remove them. Once she could see again, she opened a new salon. When the cataracts grew back, she dictated her designs to a sketcher and her assistants realized them.
After Kennedy’s assassination, Lowe finally got credit for Jackie’s wedding dress, and she liked to claim that it was exactly what the bride had asked for: “a tremendous, typical Ann Lowe gown.” (The logo on one of her labels is the dainty figure of a court lady in a hoop skirt and panniers.) Her work began to appear in national magazines. Vanity Fair featured one of her coming-out dresses in an editorial spread. The Saturday Evening Post ran a picture of three insouciant debs, riding the Central Park carrousel in their Lowe gowns. It accompanied a profile of the designer, whose headline became Lowe’s sobriquet: “Society’s Best-Kept Secret.” She played along. “I’m an awful snob,” she told Ebony, in 1966. “I love my clothes and I’m particular about who wears them. I am not interested in sewing for café society or social climbers. I don’t cater to Mary and Sue. I sew for the families of the Social Register.”
There is no evidence that Lowe’s society clients invited her to their affairs or their débuts. She heard about them secondhand: “When someone tells me, ‘The Ann Lowe dresses were doing all of the dancing at the cotillion last night,’ that’s what I like to hear.” But in 1967 Josephine Lee’s granddaughter asked Lowe to contribute a gown to be auctioned at a Junior League fund-raiser in Tampa. She was happy to oblige, though she added that—after fifty years—she was curious to attend the sort of gala that she had so often sewn for. The family brought her as a guest of honor, and she sat at the front table.
Lowe’s presence at what Powell called a “historically white event” was an audacious break with tradition. Lowe had defied exclusion countless times in her life. But, unlike Keckley, an activist for the impoverished former slaves who had flocked to Washington in 1862, and unlike Rosa Parks, a dressmaker by trade, she never played a public role in the civil-rights movement. Nor did she advertise the fact that she sewed for distinguished Black clients like Elizabeth Mance, a classical pianist, or Idella Kohke, a board member of the Negro Actors Guild. I found a picture of Kohke in the New York Age, a venerable Black newspaper. She was featured in an article on Easter finery, dated April 20, 1957. A caption describes her “fabulous ensemble—a gown of imported French black satin created by Ann Lowe.” Lowe’s name was unqualified by an epithet. It apparently needed none.
The historically white fashion press never paid attention to Harlem’s vibrant fashion scene. Yet Lowe’s name had such prestige in the Black community that the New York Age sent her to Paris, at exorbitant expense—an ocean crossing, a stay at the Hôtel Lutétia—to cover the postwar couture shows. A story from 1949 reports that Dior, Balenciaga, Paquin, Molyneux, Dessès, and other grandes maisons had received their correspondent graciously. (At one of the défilés, Lowe said, she met Mrs. Post, who introduced her as a prominent designer.) One longs to know what she made of the clothes—and of Europe. But perhaps the picture that ran with the story—of an outfit that Lowe had designed for the paper—was a form of reportage. Her “Paris-inspired creation” was a sexy black cocktail dress “with the new sheath skirt which dips very low to the right side. The overskirt is appliqued with cutwork of large dahlias. The wing collar is highlighted by a deep plunging neckline.”
There is nothing else so daring in the Lowe archives, and it made me wonder what she might have created had she been freer to innovate. “Her work was overwhelmingly pretty,” Elizabeth Way reflected. “It wasn’t radical, or meant to be. Even in the sixties, she was still inspired by the nineteenth century, and by a nostalgic ideal of femininity. Yet I also think it’s important to appreciate what breathtaking courage she had.”
Lowe’s career flourished, in part, for the same reason it would decline: she deferred to the proprieties of the women for whom she sewed. They were originally Southern belles. Later, they were East Coast patricians, or the daughters of Midwestern industrialists who lived, as Jackie had, in a bubble of gentility. But by the late nineteen-sixties society girls were interested in shacking up with rock stars and jetting off to ashrams. Coming out was a charade of purity that many endured to placate their mothers. Lowe made a late effort to evolve: she skimmed her froth; she trimmed her sails; she spiced up her palette. American Beauty—a débutante dress from 1967, smothered in roses—looks virginal from the front, but it’s backless to the waist. The Times fashion critic Virginia Lee Warren pretended to be shocked on behalf of the girl’s mother. No scandal was intended, Lowe told her; she just didn’t want the “hands of the boys” soiling her creation.
Lowe’s mantra might have been an adage attributed to Winston Churchill: “Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.” But Churchill wasn’t a self-employed Black octogenarian with an eighth-grade education and no savings.
Lowe soldiered on until 1972. Her vision outlived her sight. Only complete helplessness forced her to retire. By then, her sister had died, and she couldn’t manage her own care. (Keckley, in a similar predicament—frail and penniless—took refuge in a home for destitute women of color that, in better days, she had helped found.) Lowe moved to Queens, to live with a friend whom she described as her “adopted daughter,” Ruth Alexander—one of the assistants from Tampa who had followed her to New York. She died there on February 25, 1981. Her obituaries were a jumble of misinformation. Ann Lowe’s real story is her own best-kept secret. ♦
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