Ann Lowe

Ann Cole Lowe was born on the fourteenth of December 1898 at Clayton, Alabama, the daughter of Jack Lowe — a Black Alabama farmer — and Janie Cole Lowe — a Black Alabama dressmaker who designed for the wives of the Alabama state legislators of the post-Reconstruction Montgomery period. She was raised in the dressmaking household of her mother and grandmother — the principal Black dressmaking household of post-Reconstruction Montgomery.

She was trained by her mother and grandmother in the principal dressmaking techniques of the post-Reconstruction Alabama Black modiste tradition — including hand-rolled hems, hand-set sleeves, and the principal silk-and-organza dressmaking of the southern aristocratic wedding tradition.

She was hired in 1917 at the Tampa home of the heiress Josephine Edwards Lee as principal in-residence dressmaker — and operated the principal Lee household private atelier at Tampa from 1917 to 1928.

She completed the principal S.T. Taylor Design School at New York in 1919 — at a segregated programme in which she was instructed in a separate classroom from the white students.

She opened her first principal commercial atelier at 138 Lexington Avenue at New York in 1928 — and operated the principal Lexington Avenue atelier from 1928 to 1944.

She relocated the principal Ann Lowe atelier to the Hampton House Hotel at Lenox Avenue at Harlem in 1944 — and operated the principal Hampton House atelier from 1944 to 1953.

She was commissioned in the spring of 1953 by the Auchincloss family to design the principal wedding dress of Jacqueline Lee Bouvier for the wedding to Senator John F. Kennedy of the twelfth of September 1953 at Newport, Rhode Island. The principal Bouvier wedding dress — fifty yards of ivory silk taffeta with handmade wax flowers — was completed across the four months preceding the wedding. The Lowe atelier was flooded ten days before the wedding, destroying the dress and ten of the eleven bridesmaid dresses. Lowe reconstructed all eleven gowns in the remaining ten days at her own expense.

She opened the principal Ann Lowe Originals atelier at Madison Avenue at New York in 1968 and operated the principal Madison Avenue atelier through 1972.

She was the principal couturier of the New York debutante and society wedding tradition of the 1940s through 1960s — including the principal wedding gowns of the Du Pont, Auchincloss, Roosevelt, and Lodge family weddings of the period.

She died at Queens, New York on the twenty-fifth of February 1981 of natural causes, at eighty-two.

She is honored here as the designer of the Jacqueline Bouvier wedding dress.