How black designer of Jackie Kennedy’s wedding dress was snubbed by bride and press
- Ann Lowe was described only as ‘a coloured dressmaker’ when guests at the 1953 wedding asked the future first lady who designed her dress
- The press also largely avoided naming her, despite Lowe being the go-to dress designer for the highest of New York’s high society at the time
The 1953 wedding of Jacqueline Bouvier and the then Senator John F. Kennedy was so perfect it is still being talked about more than 65 years later. As recently as 2017, gossip website The List was still calling it “the most beautiful wedding ever”.
But for Ann Lowe, who designed the bridal gown, it was a nightmare. First, the wedding dress was destroyed 10 days before the ceremony. Then, the 24-year-old bride, who did not really like the gown in the first place, snubbed the seamstress.
When asked by her wedding guests who made the dress, Jackie simply responded “a coloured dressmaker”, as a viral tweet remembered this week.
Ann Lowe was born and raised in Clayton, Alabama. Her great-grandmother, an enslaved woman, had given birth to a child fathered by her white plantation owner. Her mother and grandmother were both seamstresses to wealthy Alabama elites, and as a child she amused herself by shaping cloth flowers out of the scraps from their work, she told Ebony magazine in 1966.
Her mother died when Lowe was 16, leaving four ball gowns for the first lady of Alabama unfinished. Lowe completed the order.
