‘Ann Lowe: American Couturier’ Review: Anonymously Dressing the Daughters of High Society

Winterthur, Del.

In 1964, the Saturday Evening Post called the couturier Ann Lowe “society’s best-kept secret.” At that point she’d been dressing women of the Social Register for decades—first designing their white debutante gowns, then their white wedding gowns, then their seasonal ballgowns, then their daughters’ debutante gowns, and so on. Just as the Grace Church wedding was de rigueur for the gilded marriages of New York’s 400, the Ann Lowe wedding dress was a midcentury must. How much of a secret was she? Lowe created the most loved wedding dress in American history: the simple in silhouette yet intricately detailed gown that Jacqueline Bouvier wore, in 1953, when she married the young Sen. John F. Kennedy. In all the press describing that day in Newport, R.I., and for years afterward, almost no one put a name to the dress. Why? Perhaps because Lowe was black.