Memory Lane - Fashion Designers in Colour Part 2

Let’s continue our feature looking at the history of black or mixed-race fashion designers. Last week, we talked about Elizabeth Keckley, who designed the inauguration dresses for Mary Todd Lincoln in the 1860s.

Francis Criss (not to be confused with an English painter ofthe same name) had a leading role in New York’s African-American  society in the early twentieth century. She designed and made dresses for prominent Hollywood actress and fashion icon Gloria Swanson as well as many Broadway stars. However, not much else is known about her.

Ann Lowe was a daughter and granddaughter of dressmakers in Alabama who designed for the State’s first ladies. After the death of her mother, she went to fashion school in New York where all her white classmates shunned her. Nevertheless, she persevered and was rewarded when she counted among her customers the crème de la crème of New York society including the Rockefeller, Roosevelt and Vanderbilt families.

Fashion designer Ann Lowe

Lowe was known as ‘society’s best kept secret’ because no-one would admit that their clothes were designed by a black woman. Even this pale blue appliquéd gown designed for Olivia de Havilland on the night she picked up her 1946 Best Actress Oscar for the film, To Each His Own was credited to Sonia Rosenberg rather than Lowe.

A delighted Olivia de Havilland

Lowe is perhaps most famous for designing this ivory-silk-taffeta wedding dress of Jacqueline Bouvier when she married future US President, John F Kennedy in 1953.

Jacqueline Bouvier on her wedding day

The Bouvier-Kennedy wedding was probably one of the biggest challenges Lowe faced in her career. A ruptured water pipe flooded her store a mere ten days before the wedding, destroying Bouvier’s gown and all the others made for the occasion. However, she managed to remake all the dresses in time for the wedding. Our favourite Ann Lowe original though is probably this debutante ball gown. 

Later in life, Lowe lost an eye after suffering from glaucoma, but she continued to design until the 1970s.

Ann Lowe’s fashions can be seen in a permanent collection at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, Washington D.C.’s Black Fashion Museum and the Smithsonian.