Meet the Tampa dressmaker who made Jacqueline Kennedy’s wedding gown

TAMPA — When profiled by the Saturday Evening Post and interviewed on “The Mike Douglas Show,” both in 1964, Ann Lowe was described as “society’s best kept secret” despite making Jacqueline Kennedy’s wedding gown and being the go-to dressmaker for social elites during the era of segregation — nearly unheard of for a Black woman.

Six decades later, the custom dressmaker with roots in Tampa is still somewhat of a secret, but her story is attracting attention.

A book on her life was recently released, a documentary is in the works and her dresses are on display in museums throughout the country — the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., and, in Tampa, at the Henry B. Plant Museum and the Tampa Bay History Center.

“She was Black and making clothes for the social elite during Jim Crow and was sponsored by a white family in the South to become better trained,” said Sharon Parker-Frazier, the New York-based documentary filmmaker. “Ann Lowe is a hidden figure whose story should be told.”

Daniel Carpenter, the Plant Museum’s operations manager, said that Lowe designed “one of the most seen wedding dresses of the 20th century, maybe even in history. And a lot of that success began in Tampa.”

Lowe was born in 1898 in Alabama, where she learned dressmaking from her mother and grandmother, who was taught the trade while enslaved, said Elizabeth Way, author of “Ann Lowe: American Couturier,” which was released in September. They “set up a thriving business in Montgomery, which was very unusual for Black women at this time” and a testament to their talent.

It’s not known why Lowe was at an Alabama department store one day in 1916, Way said, but that’s where she was discovered by Josephine Lee, a Tampa socialite visiting family.

“She was so impressed by the ensemble that Lowe was wearing that she approached her and asked, ‘Where did you get this?’” Way said. “When Lowe told her that she made it herself, she offered her a job on the spot to come and live with the family outside of Tampa and sew for herself and four daughters.”

Lowe was initially the Lees’ live-in dressmaker. With their financial assistance, she then spent six months at a New York fashion school, Way said, and moved to Thonotosassa, where she opened a made-to-order dress salon catering to Tampa Bay’s elite white social circle. She became the official dressmaker and costume designer for the Krewe of Gasparilla’s royal court.

“There’s almost always florals involved,” Carpenter said. “She was really good at taking scraps of fabric and turning them into floral arrangements. … That’s kind of her signature.”

In the late 1920s, Lowe moved to New York, where success initially escaped her.

“She started a little dress shop that failed pretty quickly,” Way said. “So, she started working on commission for other dressmakers and for other manufacturers. And it’s through that exposure that she’s slowly able to reach elite clients that she works with privately.”

In 1946, actress Olivia de Havilland wore a Lowe design when accepting her Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in the movie “To Each His Own,” according to the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s website.

Other customers included the Rockefellers and the family of Jacqueline Kennedy’s stepfather, Hugh Auchincloss. In 1953, Lowe designed the future first lady’s wedding gown and bridal party dresses.

“The gown was made with ivory-colored silk taffeta and featured an elegant portrait neckline,” according to the website for the White House Historical Association, a nonprofit founded by Kennedy to preserve the history of the president’s mansion. “The bodice was embellished with interwoven bands of tucking, and her skirt was embellished with tiny wax flowers.”

But Lowe wasn’t credited with the design until years later.

Back then, “she received very little national attention for any of her work,” Way said, in large part because her clientele was “this very closed circle of American elite. They didn’t want her name circulating into general society so that other people could snap her up.”

Also unknown for years is that a little more than a week prior to the wedding, a pipe burst in Lowe’s building, destroying the gown and 10 of the 15 dresses, the museum website says. Lowe scrambled to make new ones, but at a loss of $2,200 that she never reported to the Kennedy family.

“She was a very nice person, maybe too nice,” Carpenter said. “She didn’t overcharge people. Sometimes she undercharged. Sometimes she gave gowns away. … She actually declared bankruptcy.”

Lowe was also losing her eyesight. Her right eye was removed due to glaucoma, and she had cataracts in the other, the museum website says.

That’s when Sharmen Peddy’s parents, Benjamin and Ione Stoddard, stepped in, employing Lowe from 1962 to 1965 at Madeleine Couture, which sold made-to-order dresses in New York.

“They hired her during a very difficult time in her life,” Peddy said. “My parents were then very influential in promoting her.”

The Stoddards paid for Lowe’s cataract surgery and promoted her first fashion show.

But “the made-to-order business was really going out then,” Peddy said. “These women could buy off the rack at Saks, Bergdorf and Bendel and made-to-order became very passe in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Very few women could keep up with all the time involved in waiting for the dresses.”

When Lowe died in New York in 1981, her obituary, which ran nationally, again called her “society’s best kept secret” and said “few outsiders have heard of Ann Lowe.”

“The biggest problem is that the U.S. has a pretty short memory for its designers,” Way said. “And certainly, the fact that she didn’t have a big ready-to-wear brand, which is what American fashion is known for. She was making custom pieces in a really old-world kind of way.”

Parker-Frazier, the filmmaker, hopes Lowe soon goes from secret to household name.

“She represents an important part of fashion history and American history that people are not aware of,” she said. “We’re talking fashion crossing with race during Jim Crow. She should be an iconic figure.”