Ann Lowe

Ann Lowe was born about 1898 — often given as the fourteenth of December — at Clayton, Alabama, into a line of needlewomen: her grandmother Georgia Cole had sewn enslaved, her mother sewed for Montgomery's first families, and when her mother died mid-commission, sixteen-year-old Ann finished the governor's household's gowns and took the business. Tampa hired her; New York schooled her — the S.T. Taylor Design School, 1917, where the only Black student was made to work in a room alone, and finished early anyway.

Her own Tampa salon opened in 1920, dressing the Gasparilla courts; by 1928, with twenty thousand dollars saved, she took New York. Ann Lowe's Gowns opened on Lexington Avenue in 1950, and by the late fifties she was the featured designer of Saks Fifth Avenue's couture Adam Room, gowning du Ponts, Roosevelts, Lodges, and Auchinclosses — and in 1961, thirty-three coronation gowns for Omaha's Ak-Sar-Ben ball, underpaid as ever.

In September 1953 came the commission of the century: Janet Lee Auchincloss engaged her for her daughter Jacqueline Bouvier's wedding to Senator John F. Kennedy. Ten days before the wedding a flood destroyed the gown and most of the bridal party's dresses in her workshop; she remade them all in eight days at her own loss — some twenty-two hundred dollars — and delivered fifty yards of ivory taffeta into history. Asked who had made it, the bride is said to have answered only "a colored woman." The press printed no name. The name was Ann Lowe — as it was, uncredited, on the label of Olivia de Havilland's 1947 Oscar gown, credited then to the house she'd made it for.

The last years took her son, her salon, and her right eye, and a 1963 bankruptcy was quietly paid by an anonymous benefactor widely believed to be Jacqueline Kennedy. The Saturday Evening Post called her "society's best kept secret"; the Met, the Smithsonian, and the museums now keep her openly. She died in Queens on the twenty-fifth of February 1981, at about eighty-two. Honored be Ann Lowe, who dressed the American fairy tale and was left out of it — the record writes her in.