Ann Lowe

BORN: DECEMBER 14, 1898, CLAYTON, AL

DIED: FEBRUARY 25, 1981, QUEENS, NEW YORK, NY

(I want) to prove that a Negro can become a major dress designer.

Ann Lowe was the first African American to be recognized as a fashion designer of haute couture. Her one-of-a-kind dresses and gowns were made of dozens of yards of satin, tulle, taffeta, and silk and were decorated with delicate embellishments of handmade flowers, intricate beadwork, and jewels. Ann created wedding, ball, and cotillion gowns for elite families, and she was best known for designing the Trapunto-styled wedding gown and attendants’ dresses for the 1953 wedding of future First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier to then Senator John F. Kennedy.

Ann began sewing at the age of six. Her grandmother, an enslaved dressmaker, opened her own custom seamstress business in rural Alabama after the Civil War and continued to sew for wealthy white Southern families. When her mother died suddenly, sixteen-year-old Ann took over the family business and completed the work on several formal gowns commissioned by the governor’s wife. Eventually, Ann moved to Tampa, Florida, to sew for prominent families. In 1917, she enrolled in a couture course in New York City, but due to Jim Crow practices, Ann was forced to complete her work in a separate room from the white students who objected to her presence in their class. Ann’s sketches and drawings were often used by instructors as examples of the best designs of her class. She completed her course one year early.

In 1928, Ann settled in Harlem. For a time she worked on commission for stores such as Henri Bendel, Neiman Marcus, and Saks Fifth Avenue. By the 1950s, Ann’s intricate and meticulous work was in such demand by society families that she opened her own salon. Many of Ann’s exquisitely tailored gowns appeared in Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Town & Country magazines throughout the 1950s and ’60s. Unfortunately, Ann’s business consistently operated at a loss due to the high cost of materials and labor, and she did not achieve fame as a fashion designer during her lifetime. Today, however, her dresses are part of the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.