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.

Memory Lane - Fashion Designers in Colour part 1

Let’s take a stroll down memory lane in search of the first notable designer of colour. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that fashion design as an art form came into existence. Before that, clothing design was the province of anonymous dressmakers.

Charles Frederick Worth changed all that. Worth was actually a Englishman who moved across the channel to France and made his name by becoming a huge favourite of Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III. He set up his maison couture (or fashion house) in Paris in 1858, marking the city out as the fashion headquarters of the world.

As you can see in this photo below, Worth used lavish textiles and ornamental embroidery picked out in metallic thread and glass or crystal beads.

Charles Frederick Worth dress circa 1887 (L)

Meanwhile, across the pond in the United States of America, a former slave Elizabeth Keckley was making waves of her own. Keckley was taught dressmaking skills by her mother and had used them to buy her freedom and that of her son from her slave master. Soon afterward, she moved to the nation’s capital where she became dressmaker of choice to the Washington political wives.

Photos of Elizabeth Keckley at different stages of her life

An introduction to Mary Todd, wife of President Abraham Lincoln, soon followed. Keckley became her personal modiste, designing her dresses for both inaugurations in 1861 and 1865.

Mary Todd Lincoln and her inauguration dresses

The two women developed a great friendship, with Keckley proving to be a huge support to Mrs Lincoln after the deaths of two of her sons, and later after the assassination of her husband. Sadly, their friendship ended after Keckley published a book called Behind the Scenes or Thirty Years a Slave and Four in the White House.

A ‘kiss-n-tell’ scandal ahead of its time, Keckley insisted she wrote the book in an ‘attempt to place Mrs Lincoln in a better light before the world.’ However, the ensuing furore led to the diminishing of her white clientele. Keckley later became a university lecturer before dying in the National Home for Destitute Coloured Women and Children in Washington DC.

We'll continue our look at the history of black and mixed race fashion designers next week.