In 1953, when Ann Lowe received a commission to create a wedding gown for society swan Jacqueline Bouvier, she was thrilled. Lowe, an African-American designer who was a favorite of the society set, had been hired to dress the woman of the hour, the entire bridal party and Jackie’s mother. But 10 days before Jackie and Sen. John F. Kennedy were to say “I do,” a water pipe broke and flooded Lowe’s Madison Avenue studio, destroying 10 of the 15 frocks, including the bride’s elaborate dress, which had taken two months to make.
In between her tears, Lowe, then 55, ordered more ivory French taffeta and candy-pink silk faille, and corralled her seamstresses to work all day. Jackie’s dress, with its classic portrait neckline and bouffant skirt embellished with wax flowers, went on to become one of the most iconic wedding gowns in history, but, decades later, Lowe would die broke and unknown at age 82.
Now, the country’s first black high-fashion designer is finally getting her due. Three Lowe gowns are on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s new National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington, DC. On Dec. 6, the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan will display several Ann Lowe gowns in an exhibition on black fashion. And there are two children’s books about the designer in the pipeline.
“She was exceptional; her work really moves you,” says Smithsonian curator Elaine Nichols.
Lowe was born in Clayton, Ala., in 1898. Her grandmother was an enslaved dressmaker who stitched frocks for her white owners and opened her own business after the Civil War. Little Ann learned to sew from both her grandmother and her mother. Even at age 6 it was clear that she was quite talented.
“She would gather the scraps from her mother’s workroom and go to the garden and create these beautiful fabric flowers,” says Elizabeth Way, a curatorial assistant at the Museum at FIT, which has three Lowe dresses in its collection.
Through the 1940s to the end of the ’60s, Lowe was known as society’s “best-kept secret.”
When she was 16, Lowe took over the family business after her mother died and left an unfinished order of gowns for the governor’s wife that needed to be finished. Around this time, Lowe also married an older man named Lee Cohen and gave birth to a son, Arthur, but the union was short-lived. About a year into the marriage, the wife of a Tampa business tycoon invited her to come to Florida and create dresses for her and her daughters. Lowe jumped at the opportunity.
“It was a chance to make all the lovely gowns I’d always dreamed of,” Lowe told the Saturday Evening Post in 1964. “I picked up my baby and got on that Tampa train.” Cohen, who disapproved of her ambition, sent her divorce papers.
Lowe, however, wanted to be more than a dressmaker. In 1917, at the age of 18, she took a sabbatical from her job in Tampa to enroll in a couture course in New York City. When she arrived, the head of the school was aghast that he had admitted a black woman, and he tried to turn her away. Her white classmates refused to sit in the same room as her, but she plugged away and graduated early.
Ten years later, Lowe moved to New York for good with $20,000 she had saved working in Florida and settled in Harlem with her son. She started taking jobs as an in-house seamstress at department stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and for made-to-measure clothiers like Hattie Carnegie. It didn’t take long for word of this young, talented artist to spread.
Through the 1940s to the end of the ’60s, Lowe was known as society’s “best-kept secret,” designing outfits for famous socialites like the Rockefellers and du Ponts and Hollywood stars like Olivia de Havilland. When Christian Dior first beheld her handiwork, he exclaimed, with probably a bit of envy, “Who made this gown?”
“She had excellent technique,” says costume historian Margaret Powell, who is working on one of the kids’ books about Lowe. “Even the insides [of her dresses] are beautifully finished . . . Her clients realized that they could get the same quality as Dior at a much lower price.”
In 1950, two customers persuaded her to open her own salon, and her white business partners helped her snag a space on tony Madison Avenue. “It was difficult for a black woman at that time,” says Powell.
Unfortunately, Lowe’s business sense did not match her design acumen. She charged clients barely enough to break even, and her commission for the Kennedy wedding nearly bankrupted her.
“She bought more fabric, hired people overtime and just swallowed all the lost money [after the accident],” says author Deborah Blumenthal, who is writing another children’s book about Lowe.
Plus, Lowe was already unknowingly giving the family a bargain, charging just $500 for Jackie’s ensemble, compared with the $1,500 the dress likely would have cost from a competitor. She ended up incurring a loss of $2,200. “She never told Jackie or her family . . . It’s just heartbreaking,” Blumenthal says.
Worse, when Lowe took an overnight train to Newport, RI, to hand-deliver the dresses herself, the guards at the wedding venue told her she had to use the service door because of the color of her skin.
“She said, ‘If I have to use the backdoor, they’re not going to have the gowns!’ ” says Blumenthal. “They let her in.”
For a period of time in the 1950s, her son, Arthur, managed her books, and he helped rein in his mother’s lavish spending and keep the company afloat. But in 1958, he was killed in an auto accident, and she was frequently broke once again.
In 1962, Lowe was in a bad spot. She had closed her salon due to outstanding costs, taken a job as an in-house dressmaker at Saks, quit that, lost her eye to glaucoma — an operation she couldn’t afford and which the doctor provided gratis — and owed $12,800 in back taxes. But then she got a call from the IRS saying an “anonymous friend” had taken care of her costs. Lowe told both the Saturday Evening Post and Ebony that she believed it was Jackie, who Lowe had remained close with.
“[She] was so sweet,” Lowe told the Saturday Evening Post in 1964. “She would talk with me about anything.”
That generous gift allowed Lowe to reopen her business, and it was soon bustling. In a typical six-month period she and her three to five pattern-cutters and seamstresses would complete 35 debutante gowns and nine wedding dresses. But she was still bleeding money, and losing her eyesight, to boot. “I’ve had to work by feel,” she told the Saturday Evening Post. “But people tell me I’ve done better feeling than others do seeing.”
Around this time, Ann Bellah Copeland commissioned Lowe to create a dress for her wedding to Gerret van Sweringen Copeland, the son of Lammot du Pont Copeland.
“Her assistants hovered around her to be certain that she got it all right,” Copeland, now in her 70s, wrote in an e-mail to The Post. “No one made dresses as beautifully.”
Lowe retired in 1969, at age 71, and moved to Queens to be with her so-called “adopted daughter” Ruth Alexander — who had helped Lowe at her shop for years.
“She lived a very quiet, serious life. But everyone says that she was very sweet, very patient. Around her family she could be a funny person. And she was very determined,” says Powell. “She showed that an African-American could be a major fashion designer. She made it to that highest level. She’s an inspiration.”