How the Black fashion designer Ann Lowe made her way among the mid-century white élite.
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.
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 , chose a silk-faille, attributed to Lowe, for her portrait by an artist who had painted Queen Elizabeth.
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.
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.
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.
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 live in a world of fantasy.
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.
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.
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.
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, in the form of a story about her career. The magazine never obliged, but Jackie may have tried to make amends.
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, 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.
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