THE LIFE AND WORK OF ANN LOWE: REDISCOVERING “SOCIETY’S BEST KEPT SECRET”
Margaret E. Powell
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree
Master of Arts in the History of Decorative Arts
Masters Program in the History of Decorative Arts
The Smithsonian Associates and The Corcoran College of Art + Design
2012
! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! "2012 Margaret Eugenia Powell All Rights Reserved
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The successful completion of a project of this nature has been possible because of the generous assistance of a great number of people. So many people responded to my letters, e-mails and phone calls with great generosity and interest. They kept my spirits high when I was getting discouraged. At times, their support has been overwhelming. This project would not be possible without the time they spent opening their homes to me, sending me garments and photographs, donating their professional time, digging through their institution’s collections, archival information and their own memories and possessions to share their experiences about Ann Lowe. Thank you for helping to record Ann Lowe’s history. This project would not be possible without your participation.
Amsterdam, Holland: Elizabeth Mance De Jonge
Colorado: Pickett Huffines
Connecticut: Ann Copeland
Delaware: Delaware Historical Society: Jennifer Potts, Chief Curator
Florida: Members of the Lee family: Nell Lee Greening, Joan Apthorp, Elinor Boushall and Elizabeth Lee Barron Ye Mystic Krewe of Gasparilla: Dr. William Carson, Historian The Henry B. Plant Museum: Cynthia Gandee, Executive Director Susan Carter, Curator/Registrar, Sally Shifke, Museum Relations University of Florida: Colleen Seale, Coordinator, Reference Services, Smathers Library
Maryland: Brian J. Searby Photography: Brian J Searby
Massachusetts: American Textile Museum: Karen J. Herbaugh, Curator John F. Kennedy Museum: Jim Wagner, exhibit specialist, Kathryn Dodge
Nebraska: Connie Cowdery O’Neil Durham Museum, Omaha: Larrisa Kreyer, Registrar
i New York: Fashion Institute of Technology: Colleen Hill, Curator Saks Fifth Avenue: Leland Kass, Archivist Metropolitan Museum of Art: Elizabeth Bryan, Associate Research Curator, Costume Institute National Archives at New York City: Elizabeth Pope
Talence, France: Duchess Joan de Mouchy
Washington, DC: Hillwood Estate, Museum and Gardens: Liana Parades, Chief Curator Howard Kurtz, Textile Curator, Kate Markert, Director The Smithsonian Associates, History of Decorative Arts: Cynthia Williams, Director, Andrea Nelson, Ph.D., Dorothea Dietrich, Ph.D., Mary Doering, Peggy Newman The Container Store: Erin Lander, Ann Herrington, Mahaba Alziwir, Kip Rousell, Elizabeth Hall, Penny Weaver
My family and friends:
Thank you for your encouraging words of support (and laughter!) during this last year.
William and Sarah Powell Charlene Fossum, Carl Fossum, Caleb and Peter Fossum Carolyn and Doug Walkling Sarah Pebworth, Delia Crocker, Naomi Hathaway, Brandi Aubrey, Grace McNicholas, Katie Johnson, Marie Johnson, Nardi Hobler, Kathleen White Koherson, Lynne Davis and Jodi O’Grady
A special note of thanks to:
The Smithsonian Associates History of Decorative Arts Program Faculty for the award of a travel research grant. This grant allowed me to conduct research in Tampa, Florida.
Liana Parades, Chief Curator at Hillwood Estate Museum and Garden for suggesting that I look into Ann Lowe’s life and work.
Howard Kurtz, Textile Curator at Hillwood for his generous and knowledgeable assistance and access to Mrs. Post’s gown.
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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iii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. a) Wedding photo of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and John F. Kennedy b) Wedding Gown replica by Isabella de Borchgrave (artist’s photo) 2. Ann Lowe, pictured in her studio (Ebony, 1966) 3. Mrs. Elizabeth Kirkman O’Neal, first lady of Alabama and early client of Lowe’s mother and grandmother, 1911 4. Gasparilla Court Gown, 1926 Henry B. Plant Museum 5. Ak-Sar Ben Queen, Connie Cowdery O’Neil, 1961 (courtesy of Connie Cowdery O’Neil) 6. Debutante gown with silk carnations, Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute 7. Lowe in her studio working on a “second wedding” dress with applied silk flowers (Ebony, 1966) 8. Mrs. Josephine Edwards Lee in an undated portrait (courtesy of Joan Apthorp) 9. The Lee family home, Lake Thonotosassa, Florida (courtesy of Joan Apthorp) 10. Blue Broadcloth Traveling Suits, Rosemary and Louise Lee, 1917 (courtesy of Joan Apthorp) 11. The Lee twins, Rosemary and Louise, undated photo in matching Swiss themed costumes which may have been created by Lowe (courtesy of Joan Apthorp) 12. Grace Lee in a Lowe dress, c. 1918 (courtesy of Elinor Lee Boushall) 13. Doll dress sewn by Lowe for the youngest Lowe daughter, Nell, c. 1917 (courtesy Elinor Lee Boushall) 14. A) Organdy dress, c. 1925 (photo: Brian Searby) B) Organdy dress sleeve, c. 1925 (photo: Brian Searby) C) Organdy dress, c. 1925 (photo: Brian Searby) D) Organdy dress, c. 1925 Sleeve gathers (photo: Brian Searby E) Organdy dress, c. 1925 Sleeve horsehair (photo: Brian Searby F) Organdy dress, c. 1925 Bodice (photo: Brian Searby) G) Organdy dress, c. 1925 Bodice Back (photo: Brian Searby) 15. Butterick Deleanator illustration, showing the use of black lace and cream fabric (Butterick Deleanator, 1900) 16. Local dressmaker advertisement, 1928 (Tampa Tribune) 17. Nell Lee, 1926 the year of her Gasparilla queen reign and wedding (Tampa Tribune) 18. Nell Lee in her wedding gown, 1926 (courtesy of Elinor Boushall) 19. 1924 Gasparilla Court (Berger Brothers) 20. A) 1924 Gasparilla Court (Berger Brothers) B) Sarah Keller, Queen of 1924 Gasparilla Court (Berger Brothers) 21. 1925 Gasparilla Court, (Berger Brothers) 22. 1927 Gasparilla Court, (Berger Brothers) 23. 1928 Gasparilla Court, (Berger Brothers) 24. Beaded Silk Dress Fragment, 1924 25. Gasparilla Court Gown, Bodice, 1926 26. Trimingham gown (Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute)
iv 27. Bouvier debut gowns, Jacqueline and Lee Bouvier, 1947 portrait by Cecil National Portrait Gallery, London 28. Olivia de Havilland, Academy Awards, 1947 29. Nina Auchincloss in a Lowe gown, note that Lowe is credited (Vogue 1955) 30. Gray silk gown, Hillwood Estate, Museum and Garden (courtesy of Hillwood Estate, Museum and Garden) 31. Marjorie Merriweather Post, portrait, Douglas Chandor, 1952 (courtesy of Hillwood Estate Museum and Garden) 32. a) Post gown, Waffle Weave fabric b) Post Gown, Close up of scroll detail c) Post Gown, Interior view of scroll detail d) Post Gown, Ruched bodice 33. Post Gown, Portrait neckline 34. Post Gown, Bodice Interior 35. Post Gown, Raw edges 36. Post Gown, Boning 37. Post Gown, Waist tape 38. Copeland Wedding Gown, Bodice Interior 39. Jewel Court Gown, Bodice 40. Jewel Court Gown, 1957 41. Saks 5th Avenue Adam Room Advertisement (Alabama Heritage) 42. Ak-Sar-Ben Countess Gowns (Courtesy of Durham Museum, Omaha, Nebraska) 43. Ak-Sar-Ben Queen Gown (Courtesy of Connie Cowdery O’Neil) 44. Pickett Huffines Debutante Gown (Ebony, 1966) 45. Ak-Sar-Ben Princess gowns (Evening World Herald, Omaha, Nebraska) 46. Ak-Sar-Ben Countess gowns (Evening World Herald, Omaha Nebraska) 47. Copeland Wedding Gown 48. Copeland Wedding Gown (courtesy of Ann Copeland) 49. Justina Seeburg (Vanity Fair, 1967) 50. The Lee sisters (Tampa Tribune) 51. Tampa Junior League Gala Gown (Tampa Daily Times) 52. Illustration of Ann Lowe (Tampa Tribune) 53. Keller dress, 1924 54. Keller dress, Floral beaded design 55. Keller dress, Bugle Bead border 56. Keller dress, Silk condition 57. Gasparilla Court 1926 Composite 58. Broaddus Dress, 1926, Jeweled Medallion 59. Broaddus Dress, Seed beadwork 60. Broaddus Dress, Bead loss 61. Jewel Court bodice neckline, 1957 62. Jewel Court skirt beadwork 63. Jewel Court Tulle Pussywillows 64. Jewel Court Replacement of beading 65. Jewel Court, Deterioration at hemline 66. Jewel Court, Deterioration at cap sleeve
v
INTRODUCTION When Catherine Middleton, the future Duchess of Cambridge, arrived at
Westminster Abbey on April 29, 2011-- revealing her stunning silk and lace wedding gown for the first time -- the gown’s designer, Sara Burton, was also beginning an adventure. Burton was the creative director for the highly acclaimed fashion house of
Alexander McQueen, but up to that point she was far from a household name. Burton began as an intern at Alexander McQueen in the 1990s and worked her way up through the ranks of the fashion house. Her profile was raised considerably when it was announced that she was responsible for the most anticipated bridal commissions of the year: the wedding gown of Kate Middleton and the bridesmaid dress of her older sister,
Pippa. The Los Angeles Times introduced Burton in their wedding coverage as a designer,
“who was toiling quietly behind the scenes until the royal wedding day but is now a global fashion star.”1 Sales at Alexander McQueen increased dramatically after the wedding. At Liberty department store in London, the store’s managing director was excited to note “sales of Alexander McQueen womenswear items across the board at
Liberty, from ready-to-wear to accessories and scarves, almost doubled” as a result of the wedding coverage.2
Almost sixty years earlier, on September 13, 1953, the New York Times covered society’s wedding of the year on its front page, that of Senator John F. Kennedy and
Jacqueline Bouvier. While photographs of her intricate silk wedding gown (Figure 1a) took center stage, there was no mention of the designer of the dress:
The bride wore a gown of ivory silk taffeta, made with a fitted bodice embellished with interwoven bands of tucking finished with a portrait neckline and a bouffant skirt. She wore an heirloom veil of rose point lace that had been
vi worn by her grandmother. The veil was draped from a tiara of lace and orange blossoms and extended in a long train.3
For the dress designer, this type of international exposure should have represented a major turning point in her career. Detailed photographs of the gown in newspapers and magazines should have brought priceless name recognition. Waves of profitable business opportunities that could never be matched through an advertising campaign had the potential to create the next “global fashion star.”4
In all of the Kennedy’s wedding coverage, including international newspapers, newsreels and magazines, the designer, Ann Lowe of New York City, was not identified.5
The Boston Globe acknowledged that the event’s gowns came from “a New York dressmaker who has been her (Jacqueline) mother’s dressmaker for several years”6 but aside from that brief note, the artist behind the work remained a mystery. When fashion reporters asked Mrs. Kennedy about her gown after the wedding she described the designer as “a colored woman dressmaker”7 and with those words the possibility of thousands of dollars of free advertising for Ann Lowe’s Madison Avenue dress salon disappeared into thin air.
Even today as the Kennedy wedding gown resides in the permanent collection of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, Massachusetts, most people remain unaware of the historical significance of its designer.8 Very few people realize that this dress is the work of an African American dressmaker and that it is just one example of the countless dresses she designed for members of the Social Register, an elite segment of the American upper class.
Ann Lowe’s story is remarkable. With little more than an inadequate elementary education in rural Alabama, sewing lessons from her family, and encouragement from her
vii early clients, Lowe became a designing powerhouse. Her custom dresses in the field of
Bridal and Debut gowns were preferred by an elite group of clients for more than sixty years and she became one of the first African American women to operate a couture dress salon on Madison Avenue. Stylistically, Lowe’s work reflects a French influence. Her gowns were heavily structured and heavily adorned with a presence that Gerri Stutz, the president of the American department store Henri Bendel between 1957 and 1986, described as “a fairy princess look.” Her style set the perfect tone for the debutantes and brides she served. “That is why these clothes are so right for these young women,” Stutz explained, “because this is a fairy tale moment in their lives.”9 Ann Lowe’s fairy tale-like gowns appeared in Vogue, Vanity Fair and Town and Country magazines during the late
1960s. One gown also appeared at the 19th Academy Awards in 1947, when Olivia de
Havilland, who would also become that year’s winner for Best Actress, chose to wear one of her designs at the event. There are ten Ann Lowe dresses in the permanent collection in the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a small number in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution.10 With a resume like that, it would be unheard of for a designer of this caliber to remain in the shadows, but in the case of Ann Lowe, that is exactly what happened. She obtained a small amount of recognition during the
1960s, when nostalgia about anything related to the Kennedy family found an audience, but this attention was mostly grounded in Lowe’s status as a novelty instead of a talented artist.11 To the press, Lowe was an elderly “Negro” seamstress with one eye and a sophisticated list of long-term clients that was difficult to believe. An article in the
Saturday Evening Post dubbed Lowe “Society’s Best-Kept Secret” because she was responsible for so many of the gowns worn by many of the country’s wealthiest women,
viii but remained virtually unknown outside of that circle. How could this woman design one of the most important gowns for a woman who is remembered as being one of the world’s most fashionable women? “Rich women pass her name among themselves--,” the
Post stated, “some have even cheated her. But few outsiders have heard of Ann Lowe, the only Negro to become a leading American dress designer.”12 Attention from this article led to a few other interviews in newspapers and magazines throughout the decade and an appearance on the Mike Douglas Show, one of the most popular television interview programs of the time, but Lowe was never able to turn this attention to her professional advantage.13
In the Mike Douglas interview, Lowe explained that the driving force behind her work was “to prove that a Negro can become a major dress designer,”14 and in fact, the predominant theory behind Lowe’s exclusion from the story of popular American fashion is simply that the American public was not ready to accept her argument. As a result of producing special-occasion gowns for an almost exclusively white clientele during a time of institutionalized racism in the United States, the theme of racial identity has framed the reception and interpretation of her work. However this almost single-minded focus on race may have actually limited analysis of Lowe as a designer and her body of work.
Existing scholarship about Lowe’s designs focuses on her wrongful exclusion from fashion history and argues that any African American designer working for white customers in the middle of the twentieth century would not have been taken seriously by the predominately white fashion industry. Lowe however, was taken seriously by major talents in the field including Christian Dior, Edith Head and a number of influential executives at the leading department stores of the time.15 A careful analysis of Lowe’s
ix career through a study of her biography and little known examples of her work, many of which are being studied for the first time, will show that the reasons behind Lowe’s muted historical status as a curiosity instead of an accomplished fashion designer are more than simply a matter of her race. This thesis will argue that an intriguing combination of racial attitudes, social conditions, missed educational opportunities, outdated business models and health problems contributed to the loss of Lowe’s rightful place in the story of American history.
Although her professional dressmaking work may have started as early as 1910,
Lowe came to prominence during the rapidly changing New York couture scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s. A respected luxury fabric vendor at the time, Arthur Dages, acknowledged to the Saturday Evening Post that a mix of racial attitudes in the United
States and changing fashion trends contributed to Lowe’s lack of visibility. He believed that her couture designs were of such high quality that if she “had lived in France she’d have been as well known as Chanel or Dior” while he also noted that her stylistic decisions were also responsible for her faded status. Lowe was well known for her structured and voluminous gowns, a style that would fall out of fashion throughout the late 1960s as American women adapted more casual styles of dress, “she deals in elegance,” Dages explained, “and that’s an idea that has been forgotten in this country…she’s the only person left who has the courage to continue along these lines.”16
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, when racial relations were improving and other
African American designers were finding success throughout the Manhattan fashion district, Lowe’s career began to fail. The aging business model she adapted from watching her mother and grandmother run their dressmaking business in Alabama, along
x with her apparent reluctance to move with the changing fashion trends and her struggle with Glaucoma would force her to close her final Manhattan couture salon, Ann Lowe’s
Originals, in 1972.
Examples of Lowe’s work under consideration were created between 1917 and
1964 and include dresses from private collections as well as dresses in the collection of the Delaware Historical Society in Wilmington, Delaware, The Durham Museum in
Omaha, Nebraska, The Henry Plant Museum in Tampa, Florida and Hillwood Estate,
Museum and Gardens in Washington, DC. Previous clients of Ann Lowe have been identified and interviewed about their experiences with the designer. Descendants of Ann
Lowe’s earliest clients have also been interviewed. These discussions provided valuable information about an important period of Ann Lowe’s career, between 1916 and 1928, that has never been adequately researched. A majority of the dresses in the collection of major American museums are ball gowns created during the height of Lowe’s Manhattan career. Examinations of earlier examples of Lowe’s work will help to fill in the stylistic gaps evident in Lowe’s collected works. These earlier dresses will help to complete the picture and introduce the work of the woman known by her clients as “Society’s Best
Kept Secret” to a wider audience.17
xi Chapter 1: Southern Style
The rural Alabama town where Ann Lowe (c1898 – 1981) (Figure 2) was born was a world away from the glamorous New York fashion district where she would work for forty years. Clayton, Alabama of the late 1890s was a lush section of Barbour
County, a predominately African American part of Alabama’s “Cotton Belt.”1 The town had a population of 2,100.2 Lowe moved to the city of Montgomery as a small child and remained in the area until 1916, although many of the details of her childhood are unclear.3 Throughout her life, Lowe gave a number of inconsistent statements about the dates and circumstances of her childhood. These varied accounts may have been the result of an aging memory; she was in her late sixties at the time of her earliest interviews, or perhaps it was an attempt to avoid revealing a very early marriage, the first of two to end in divorce or an earlier birth date than Lowe’s self-reported birth date of 1898. The date of Lowe’s first marriage is unknown, but census records indicate that she lived in Dothan, Alabama, with her husband, Lee Cone, in 1910.4 Very little family information is available in Alabama’s archive of vital records and it is likely that state birth and wedding records for the family during this time period never existed.5 Nothing, for instance is known about Lowe's father, Jack Lowe. It is also not known if Sallie
Mathis, introduced publicly as Lowe’s sister in a 1966 article in Ebony, was her only sibling. The sisters remained close throughout their lives, working and living together until Sallie’s death in 1967. They spoke in detail with Ebony about their everyday life in
New York, but did not mention their early experiences in Alabama.6 Their extended family (on their mother’s side) remained in Alabama, in the same area settled by the family’s patriarch, a freeman carpenter named General Cole.7
1 General Cole was Lowe’s maternal grandfather. He was born in Alabama and moved to Clayton during the late 1850s to work on the new Clayton courthouse. He married Georgia Thompkins, a slave at the time, and purchased her freedom along with the freedom of her daughter Janie in 1860.8 Georgia was a seamstress during slavery, and in freedom she used these skills to build a business as a professional dressmaker.
Janie became her assistant, and a proficient dressmaker as well. Together, the two women sewed for elite white families throughout Montgomery. One of their most affluent clients was Elizabeth Kirkman O’Neal, a popular society matron who became the First Lady of Alabama in 1911.9 Mrs. O’Neal was described by the Montgomery
Advertiser as being a fashionable woman, “of marked grace and charm of manner” and the Lowe’s family proudly sewed gowns for the O’Neals for years. Lowe often referred to the designs “of old fashioned ball gowns like one that her mother had made for a
Montgomery belle” when she worked on especially grand assignments.10 It is not known if Janie was responsible for the afternoon dress (Figure 3) or the ball gown Mrs. O’Neal wore at the 1911 Governor’s Inaugural Ball, which was “fashioned a la Josephine, and made of garnet chiffon velvet embroidered with gold, defined with golden cords” but descriptions of the types of garments Mrs. O’Neal preferred during this period provide a glimpse into the quality of the work she was ordering from the Coles.11 The elaborate style of the red velvet inaugural gown was typical of the sophisticated Parisian influence visible in gowns of the Edwardian period. The influence of Georgia and Janie’s use of plush fabrics and fancy notions with metallic thread and paste stones known as
“brilliants” on such voluminous and dramatic gowns can be identified on Lowe’s most ornate works, including a gold lamé dress with red glass beads and brilliants that Lowe
2 designed in 1926 in Tampa, Florida (Figure 4) and a Nylon net gown from 1961 with sixty different hand beaded motifs (Figure 5).
Lowe developed her sewing skills as she played at the side of her mother and grandmother. She described this early training in a 1964 television interview on The
Mike Douglas Show as her family's way of making sure that there was, “enough for you to do.”12 Georgia and Janie were wise to pass along a trade that could help the girls to support their family. Teaching dressmaking to the Lowe children was more than just a way of keeping them out of trouble. Dressmaking was clean and steady work. It was relatively easy on the body (when compared to the work of a laundress or a housekeeper) and it was the type of occupation that could be pursued comfortably within the home. Dressmaking was also a common path for African American women who needed to find ways of contributing to their family income.13 The precision and patience required to become a seamstress made it a challenging skill for children to master, but
Lowe and her older sister Sallie were well suited to the work. At ten years old, Lowe could make her own patterns.14 A story retold in her funeral program recounts the growth of Lowe’s skill with great admiration, stating that by the time she was five years old, “little Ann took up the needle and never put it down again. She became famous for the exquisite flowers that adorned her spectacular creations. She had learned to make them at this early age using scraps that her mother and grandmother had thrown away.”15 Lowe’s very first dress, a red calico dress with black polka dots, was an impressive accomplishment for the young teenager. Her finishing skills were still developing and although she thought that the dress “was a little long” when it was finished, she proudly “wore it to church that Sunday anyway.”16
3 Lowe used her signature fabric flowers as a recurring theme throughout her career on her couture and wholesale dresses (Figure 6, Figure 7). She also taught the technique to her staff. These decorations were so realistic that in one case a dress was returned to her salon after a debutante ball to repair damage caused when the debutante’s date “snipped a beautiful silk carnation from the dress as a memento.”17
The vocational training that Lowe’s family provided to their children was a helpful and necessary supplement to their formal education. While Lowe’s enrollment in the Alabama public school system cannot be verified, she mentioned leaving school at the age of 14 to get married therefore it can be assumed that she was enrolled.18 The quality of the Lowe children’s formal education depended upon the quality of the
Alabama public schools. In 1911, 49% of eligible African American children were enrolled in the Alabama public school system.19 All public schools in the state were segregated and African American schools were kept in exceptionally poor condition.
The average length of the school year in African American schools was 85 days
(compared to 127 days a year in the white-only schools), and the average attendance among African Americans was 66 days.20 Financial disparity between the budgets of the two school systems also created a substantial barrier to quality instruction. The amount spent on each African American student during the period of Lowe’s attendance is not known, but after a multi-year push from the United States Department of Education to improve schools across the state in 1920, Alabama raised spending to four cents per day on each African American elementary school student as compared to the twelve cents spent each day on each white elementary school student.21
4 With these types of statistics, it seems that the school system’s expectations for
African American students were quite low. The system’s administrators assumed that students would grow up to become laborers or domestic workers instead of scholars. The physical conditions of the schools reflected this belief. Instead of building traditional schoolhouses, African American schools throughout the state were assigned to existing privately owned buildings such as dilapidated churches that were not suited for school use. A United States Department of Education report from 1919 found that the physical conditions of schools for African American children throughout Alabama had been unacceptable for years, stating, “In the case of a church school, the seating is very unsatisfactory, as the church benches are used and the children have no desks to work on…the blackboard in the church school generally consists of several strips of painted wood fastened to two uprights and leaned against a wall.”22 These schools were not equipped with desks, proper sanitation or other standard pieces of educational equipment found in the majority of Alabama’s white schools.23 At least 70% of the teachers in
African American schools throughout the state held the lowest teaching certificate available, one that was usually granted as an “emergency” certificate to teachers who could not pass the state teaching certification exam. This certificate represented less than an eighth grade education.
The meager resources allotted by the Alabama Board of Education greatly affected the learning process, but regardless of the condition of her local school, Lowe grew up in a literate household.24 This may have been an uncommon circumstance for
African American children in her area during this period and the school system offered very few tools to improve the situation.25 Illiteracy rates were a reflection of the lasting
5 consequences of insufficient educational spending. Illiteracy rates for African
Americans residents of all ages were as high as 29% in Lowe’s area of Montgomery in
1914. In Lowe’s estimated age group statewide, 11% of the 34,316 white children were classified as illiterate, compared to 35% of the 31,004 African American children in the same age group.26 Curriculum was maintained at a very basic level and even if Lowe attended school every day it was offered, she would not have been provided with the basic math instruction required to successfully navigate the financial side of her future business.27 It is possible that her teachers may not have had the math proficiency to teach at a level above primary school.
Lowe left school during her early teenage years and became an official part of the family business. When Janie died during the winter of 1914, several unfinished gown commissions for an upcoming ball became Lowe's responsibility.28 “It was my first big test in life,” she recalled in 1966, “I remember it was Christmas time and there were a number of unfinished gowns in our house. There was a big affair coming up, the
Governor’s Ball on New Year’s Eve, and the ladies were in a terrible panic that their dresses wouldn’t be ready on time.” Lowe completed the dresses on a tight timeline and delivered the completed dresses successfully. “After the ball, they told me that they were very happy with what I did and that my work matched my mother’s.”29 This first professional accomplishment gave her the feeling that, “there was nothing I couldn’t do when it came to sewing.”30
If she had been able to continue with the family sewing business, Lowe’s modest success as a dressmaker throughout Montgomery would have been secure. Her mother's former clients thought highly of her work and the first lady remained in her prominent
6 social position until 1915. Unfortunately, Lowe’s husband was against her new career.
Lee Cone was a tailor, and while the combination of a husband/wife, tailor/dressmaker sounds like an attractive business arrangement, the Saturday Evening Post reported that
Cone, “did not want (Lowe) to sew, and for a time, she didn’t.”31 She did, however, continue to sew her own wardrobe and this practice would be indirectly responsible for
Lowe's return to professional dressmaking in 1916.
The story of Lowe’s “discovery” in her hometown of Dothan, Alabama, suggests that her outfits were so fashion forward and professionally executed that they caught the eye of fashionable women throughout the city. One of these women, a society matron named Josephine Edwards Lee (Figure 8), was the wife of a successful Tampa businessman. The Lees were originally from Dothan, but moved away during the early
1900s to explore business opportunities in the growing citrus industry.32 Their family enjoyed an affluent lifestyle in Florida, although Mrs. Lee was unable to find a quality seamstress who could keep up with the needs of her four active daughters. When Lee noticed Lowe in the middle of a Dothan department store, she asked a salesgirl where she could find similar clothing.33 She was deeply impressed when she learned that the outfit Lowe was wearing was of her own design.34 Lowe recalled that Mrs. Lee, “said she had never seen a colored girl so well dressed” and invited her to Tampa, Florida, to work as a seamstress for her family.35 “I’m from Tampa,” Lee told her, “and there isn’t anyone there who can sew like that.”36
For Lowe, the move to Tampa was a bridge leading back to the career that she loved and missed. A position as a live-in seamstress for an upper class southern family hundreds of miles away from home may have sounded like an unconventional offer, but
7 the Lee family had more than enough work to keep a live-in seamstress busy. The eldest
Lee daughters, Rosemary and Louise, were twenty-one year old identical twins who preferred to dress alike. Their twin preferences turned out to be a challenge for the local dressmakers, and with the girls preparing for marriage in an upcoming joint ceremony,
Lowe’s expertise arrived at just the right time.37 She looked forward to the new challenge. “I could hardly believe it!” Lowe explained fifty years later to the Saturday
Evening Post, “It was a chance to make all the lovely gowns I’d always dreamed of.”
She believed that it was too good of an opportunity to decline and although her husband disagreed, Lowe followed her own judgment and moved to Tampa. She would later recall, “when I told my husband, he told me to stay home. But I picked up my baby and got on that Tampa train.”38 This decision would have grave consequences for her family however, and Lee Cone was not supportive. “A while later,” Lowe explained, “he divorced me.”39 In spite of this, Lowe continued to use her married name, Annie Cone, while in Tampa.40
Lowe arrived to Lake Thonotasassa, Florida with her son Arthur in late 1916.
Lake Thonotasassa was a vacation community that was connected by rail to Tampa, the closest major city, fourteen miles away.41 Mother and son moved into the Lee family’s large Victorian estate on the shores of the lake (Figure 9) with Josephine, her husband
Dempsey Cowan Lee, their six children and other members of the live in staff.42 The
Lees were an active and social family, appearing regularly on the society pages of the
Tampa Tribune and Tampa Daily Times. Sewing for an elite society family mirrored the seamstress roles and responsibilities Lowe observed in her own household as a child.
8 The four Lee daughters ranged in age from twelve to twenty-one, and along with
Josephine, the girls often required elaborate new dresses in the latest styles.43
Although Lowe lacked the formal training of other dressmakers around Tampa, she was able to put her years of experience creating those dramatic Alabama ball gowns to good use. Lowe’s account of her time with the Lees suggests that the financial details of the arrangement were respectful and profitable for the young seamstress.44 The family purchased all of the materials necessary, provided room and board for Lowe and
Arthur and paid her a salary. She was also allowed to take in work from neighbors, and a number of friends in the Lee family circle were soon wearing dresses by Annie Cone.45
The dresses for the upcoming wedding of twin daughters, Rosemary and Louise, were Lowe’s first responsibility.46 The Lee twins married brothers from another prominent Tampa family, the Johnstons, in a dual ceremony on December 30, 1916.
Lowe designed the dresses for the entire wedding party including the brides, bridesmaids, ribbon bearers and flower girls. She also designed each bride's trousseau.
The twins dressed alike throughout their lives and it was not surprising to family members when they requested identical trousseaux.47 While the Lee wedding gowns no longer exist, and it is not known if they were identical, this description from the January
1, 1917 Tampa Daily Times indicates that they coordinated well. “The brides wore beautiful wedding gowns of white satin, embroidered in silver and pearls, and trimmed with exquisite lace also. They were fashioned with long trains, and they wore tulle veils caught (sic) orange blossom wreaths.” Twelve year-old Nell, one of the two ribbon bearers at the ceremony, wore a dress of “gold cloth and tulle trimmed with lace” and carried a streamer with a ribbon of matching cloth down the aisle. The two bridesmaids,
9 including seventeen year-old Grace, wore “very becoming creations of golden tint, with which they wore golden picture hats.”48
The Tampa Daily Times reported that the brides traveled after the wedding ceremony to Atlanta and then on to Franklin, North Carolina, in suits of “blue broadcloth with moleskin trimmings and other accessories to match.”49 These are the only garments from this first Lee family order that still survive through photographs
(Figure 10).
As a live-in seamstress, Lowe created special occasion dresses and daywear for
Josephine and the girls during this period. A set of costumes with Swiss waists and puffed sleeves (Figure 11) sewn for the twins and a white day suit for Grace, a young co-ed at the time (Figure 12) are typical examples of her work. One Lee daughter, twelve year-old Nell, was a bit too young to enjoy all of the benefits of a full time dressmaker, but Lowe found a kind way to make her feel included. In 1965, Nell recalled that Lowe dressed her dolls when she first arrived to Lake Thonotasassa, “when
I was still too young to wear her clothes.”50 One of these doll dresses (Figure 13), a cotton nightgown with openwork detail on the bodice, appears to have survived and remains in Tampa (on one of Nell’s original dolls) with her daughter, Nell Lee Greening and granddaughter Elinor Boushall.51
An organdy afternoon dress with black machine-made lace, made for one of the
Lees during the 1920s is intact. This dress was designed for Josephine Lee and it may be one of Lowe’s earliest intact works (Figure 14a). The dress belongs to Joan Apthorp, of
Tampa, Florida, and the granddaughter of Louise Lee Johnston. This flowing ivory dress is similar in style to an Edwardian period lingerie dress but the similarities between
10 dresses from a decade or two earlier may be more of a reflection of Josephine's personal style than an indication of fashionable trends of the period. This ivory “Lingerie Dress” features puffed short sleeves with bands of black machine made lace insertions (Figure
14b) and a full skirt (Figure 14c) with lace insertion applied in a zigzag pattern. This dress was designed to compliment Josephine Lee's society lifestyle. It was probably not intended for special occasions, but it would have been appropriate for afternoon teas, visits to friends or charitable daytime events around Tampa. Lee was a member of the
Tampa Women's Club, the Tampa Yacht Club, and the Tampa Junior League and would have had many opportunities to wear this and other similar dresses at informal social events.52 A detailed discussion of the gown’s construction and condition can be found in
Appendix A.
At the beginning of 1917, Lowe worked for the Lees under the same financial arrangement while she accepted a growing number of commissions in the neighborhood, sewing for the Lee family’s neighbors and friends. This allowed Lowe to save some of her earnings for use later in the year towards tuition at a dressmaking school in
Manhattan.53 Magazines were her primary source of design education at this point, and she hoped that this advanced education in the country’s fashion capital would help her to open her own shop.54 Josephine and Dempsey encouraged Lowe to attend the school and assisted with their financial support.55 Lowe took the train to New York City in April
1917, and settled temporarily in Manhattan.56 The Lee family expected “Annie” (as they called her) to return to Tampa after a brief New York adventure. This would be Lowe’s first experience in an area with relaxed segregation laws, and there is no doubt that this young woman raised in rural Alabama found excitement in her first visit to a large city.57
11 The challenges Lowe discovered in 1917 Manhattan transcended her coursework. “Not that there was 'segregation' or something.” Lowe would joke in an interview in 1966:
Oh no. The whole idea to admit a Negro girl to a high-class fashion school was absurd and even ridiculous. The director of the famous school, a Frenchman, didn't believe I had the $1,500 for the course-- he just laughed. When I showed him my bankbook, he stopped laughing, but he still didn't believe that I could learn what he was teaching there...he almost didn’t take me when he found out I was a Negro.58
The director agreed to accept a “Negro” student if she agreed to work in a segregated classroom. “The other girls said that they wouldn't work in the same room with me, so he set me off in a room by myself.”59
In time, the quality of Lowe's work, grounded in the complicated dressmaking techniques she learned from Janie and Georgia such as her careful finishing techniques and handmade fabric flowers, impressed the instructor and other students. Lowe remarked later, “After awhile, when he saw the work I was doing, he began taking samples in to show the others. Before you knew it they were coming in to watch me.”60
At the director’s request, Lowe finished the one-year curriculum in six months, recalling years later that the director explained his offer for early completion by telling her,
“There is nothing more that we can teach you. You are very good.”61
Lowe's next steps during late 1917 and early 1918 are difficult to confirm. In
1966, Lowe told the Oakland Tribune that she worked briefly as a finisher in a
Manhattan dress shop for several months, sewing together garments from pre-cut pieces, before returning to the Lee household.62 That same year however, Sepia magazine wrote that Lowe “opened her own fashion shop in New York” after dressmaking school and
12 became, “probably the youngest independent dressmaker of all times...her creations became the talk of the town, practically overnight. But businesswise her venture was a disaster. She returned to her hometown where her artistry was still well remembered.”63
It is possible that the author confused details of Lowe's 1917 trip to New York with a later move to the city during the late 1920s when Lowe opened a small shop on
West 46th street and attempted to operate her first independent dressmaking business.
That venture survived for a year.64 In 1918 however, Lowe was not prepared for such a bold move, and neither was the New York fashion district along Seventh Avenue. Paris remained the world’s fashion capital, even with the ongoing devastation of World War I and many fashionable New Yorkers continued to bypass American designers if they were presenting anything other than French copies. A publicity director for the New
York Post described the period just as Lowe was finishing her coursework:
The American Press, in its editorial columns poured forth patriotic propaganda about the fashions of our native dressmakers, but the women’s pages of the same newspapers gave the headlines to Paris necklines and hemlines. Society women threw their energy into organizing gala American fashion fetes for war charities…but when they went shopping for themselves, they demanded the latest Paris models.65
This atmosphere meant that New York was probably not the best choice for Lowe’s next professional endeavor. She wanted to open a shop and continue to sell evening clothes.
It would also have been exceptionally difficult for an African American woman to rent a workspace in 1917. With few business connections, any space that she might be able to find on her own would have been prohibitively expensive. Tampa, on the other hand, was growing. In 1917, the city was described as being in “boom times…when money and aspirations walked hand-in-hand.”66 The cigar and citrus industries were growing,
13 individual income tax laws were still not in place and members of Tampa Society kept themselves busy with a number of dances and other events. The Lee family account of this time in Lowe's life confirms that Lowe returned to Lake Thonotasassa shortly after completing her coursework and lived with the family until her second marriage to a hotel bellman named Caleb West around 1920. Lowe then moved to Tampa with her family and settled in a rented house on Pierce Street (they would later move to 1514
Jefferson Street) in the African American residential area.67
Lowe continued to sew for the Lees throughout the 1920s, as her business outside of the Lowe family circle continued to grow. She became known for her exquisite bridal work and in the small social circle of Tampa’s elite, the appearance of every “elaborate and truly beautiful” wedding party worked as advertising for the next.68
Bridesmaids would possibly become brides in the near future, and they certainly remembered the quality of Lowe’s work. Lowe’s wedding gowns provided dramatic moments at each ceremony as guests became “really almost breathless at their marvelous beauty.”69 The success she found through her wedding work allowed her to put plans into place to grow her business, and within a few years, she had grown into the most popular dressmaker in the area. “There have been very few if any of the big weddings in the last half dozen years,” claimed the Social Mirror in 1927, “that Annie did not have the responsibility of the gowns worn by the bride and her attendants.”70
Lowe’s designs followed traditional couture methods and were extremely labor intensive. Creating multiple dresses for each wedding party required a number of well- trained helpers, and Lowe had very particular skill requirements. The Tampa Tribune noted that the designer worked without patterns and that much of Lowe’s work
14 “required hand stitching literally thousands of beads and sequins into intricate forms.”71
To accomplish Lowe’s vision of high quality and innovative design, she needed a staff with special training.
The only way for Lowe to obtain a highly trained staff in a small southern town like Tampa was to hire promising novices and train them. At the Jefferson Street house,
Lowe set up a workroom behind her home and offered dressmaking classes to a small group of neighborhood women. One of these students, an African American woman named Martha Ravannah would eventually work as a seamstress at “Annie Cone.”
Ravannah was not a professional seamstress when she arrived at Lowe’s workroom, but
Ravannah’s daughter recalled that her mother learned all of the skills needed to become a skilled dressmaker:
…she took this course in sewing from this lady. The lady came down to Tampa from New York, opened up this school, and taught these people to sew. I think she had a very small class and as a seamstress, she did a lot of work on dresses and gowns and all that kind of thing. And then she went on back to New York and that same lady made some of Jacqueline Kennedy’s wedding clothes.72
Ravannah sewed for Lowe until 1928 and continued to work as an independent dressmaker for the rest of her career.73 In a 1965 Tampa Tribune article, Ravannah described the working environment at “Annie Cone.” Her memories, as captured in the
Tribune article, provide detailed information about the shop that would otherwise be lost. Lowe worked with her small staff in a workroom behind her house on Jefferson
Street. The studio had “three dress forms, a long cutting table, a cabinet for accessories…and a few sewing machines.”74
“Annie Cone” may have been the launching pad for a number of Tampa’s
African American seamstresses. Lowe claimed to employ at least eighteen women
15 during the shop’s lifetime.75 It is not known if they were all African American, although the women who have been identified as employees by the 1965 Tampa Tribune article and a woman named Gussie Sheffield, who placed an advertisement noting her connection to Lowe, were African American. Sheffield’s advertisement on the Society page of the Tampa Morning Tribune, describes her as a “Dressmaker and designer of original frocks---for years associated with Annie Cone West.”76 Notable because of the use of Lowe’s full name, this advertisement (Figure 16) is the only published source from the period, aside from the article written in The Society Mirror, to support Lowe's claims of hiring employees and running a business that was well known and well respected by the elite members of Tampa society.77 By the time Ms. Sheffield placed her ad, Lowe was living in New York City. Sheffield's ad is definitely an attempt to claim some of Lowe's previous Tampa customers for herself. The ad’s placement as the only dressmaker's advertisement on the “Society” page that day demonstrates Sheffield's hope of being noticed by the circle of women for whom she worked during her employment with Lowe. Sheffield also used an entire line of text to mention her connection to Lowe, at a time when newspaper advertisements were priced by the line.
Being affiliated with Annie Cone West was clearly helpful in the world of Tampa’s society dressmakers.
Clients brought their fabric to the shop, and although Lowe did not appear to work from patterns, she did maintain a client record “of their sizes, as well as any physical peculiarities such as minute differences of shoulder height-on file.”78 As a rule,
Lowe did not repeat designs. This tradition began in Tampa, and continued throughout her career. In a 1976 interview with the Tampa Tribune, she proudly recalled, “You
16 know, I never made two dresses alike, except for bridesmaids. After I made a debutante or wedding dress, I filed the sketch away with swatches of the material and it was never used again.”78 Former customers recalled that they would go to Lowe’s shop the evening of their events and slip into their gowns right there, “they would dress on the spot…and sail into the night. There was never any question of fit and there never were any complications about it.”79
In 1926, Lowe created the dresses for Nell Lee’s wedding.80 This commission demonstrates that the Lees remained a part of Lowe’s circle while she found greater professional success with her own sewing business in Tampa. Nell was a popular young woman, as the queen of Gasparilla that year (Figure 18) her ceremony received attention from the Tampa newspapers. Lowe created all of the gowns for the ceremony, including the gowns for the bride, bridesmaids, flower girls and mother of the bride. The gowns of the bride’s six attendants were:
fashioned alike from apple-green taffeta. They were made robe-de-style with full skirts shirred on to tight bodices. The necks were finished with deep georgette bertha collars, edged with tiny ruffles, hanging to the waist in the back and tied at the neck with a bow of taffeta. The skirts were scallops, finished at the hem with four tiny picoted ruffles. They wore large yellow horsehair braid hats, trimmed with wide apple-green velvet ribbon and carried graceful arm bouquets of daisies.81
Nell’s gown (Figure 18) was white silk satin, “entirely untrimmed except for an exquisite duchess Bertha of rose point lace. The waist was tight fitting with a full skirt and a long princess train extending from the shoulders.”82 The skirt was finished with an asymmetrical hemline that was popular with wedding gowns of the period.
From the coverage of Lowe’s work in the Social Mirror it can be determined that
Lowe owned one of the most popular dressmaking establishments in Tampa.
17 Interestingly, she managed to achieve this success without any kind of advertising. In ten editions of the Tampa City Directory, no mention of Annie Cone’s dress shop can be found.83 Lowe is listed in a residential listing with her husband, Caleb West, in multiple editions of the directory but she is not included in any edition’s listing of independent dressmakers (both white and African American) or clothing shops.84 It is possible that the Tampa City Directory only listed paying clients in their business section. That being the case, Lowe may have decided not to spend money for a listing.85 Additionally,
Lowe's business probably looked very similar to the dressmaking business run by
Georgia Cole, Janie Lowe and other African American dressmakers at the turn of the twentieth century. Her customers were an exclusive, and an exclusively white, group of women from Tampa's high society. It is possible that this type of customer avoided city directories and hired dressmakers based on word of mouth alone.
Lowe's strong customer base brought her great success in Tampa but the support of the Lee family and their friends would not be enough to shield Lowe from the serious business challenges posed by the social conditions of the time. Like all southern communities in the early twentieth century, Tampa was racially segregated. Public transportation and facilities were officially segregated in 1905, but the people of Tampa lived in divided communities long before official laws were established.86 This division presented challenges for an African American business owner who maintained an exclusively white clientele. Lowe's white dressmaking competitors maintained a significant advantage because there were no legal or social reasons to physically separate them from their customer base. A white seamstress could rent a workspace in the middle of Tampa's main business district and easily set up shop in view of her
18 affluent audience. White landlords would rent to her, although it is possible that during the 1920s, her husband or father would need to be officially involved in financial papers.
Supply vendors would take her business and possibly offer the credit needed to purchase the high quality and expensive materials that couture gowns required. These doors were closed to an African American seamstress. An average of ten African Americans were listed each year as dressmakers in the Tampa City Directory between 1919 and 1924, but they each operated within the African American business district.87 Lowe found success in her home workshop, but if she had hopes of expanding and opening up a true dress shop, it is not surprising that it did not happen in Tampa.
The business closed in 1928, when Lowe moved to New York City. She held fond memories of her twelve years in Tampa, even though it would only represent a small portion of her successful career. Writing to Rosemary Lee Johnston in 1965, Lowe suggested that her connections in Tampa were extremely precious, “knowing the Top
Society people in New York has not been like knowing the Lees and others in Tampa. I have always felt you were sincere.”88 Lowe also explained the importance of her time in
Tampa to a reporter from The Tampa Tribune in 1976, from her New York City hospital bed:
Take a message to the women of Tampa who might remember me. Tell them I love each and every one. In my mind, they are young, beautiful, excited about a wedding, Gasparilla, or a party. Those were the happiest days of my life and I will always feel that Tampa is my real home. People were so kind and so good to me there. I find myself reliving those days, and those memories bring me great happiness.89
Gasparilla
The commissions that brought Lowe such “great happiness” were related to
Tampa’s most elite tradition, the annual Gasparilla festival. In 1924, Lowe began a new
19 partnership with a Tampa organization named “Ye Mystic Krewe of Gasparilla.” The
Krewe was already a tradition in Tampa, as a social club that began in 1904 and hosted an elaborate annual festival called Gasparilla.90 Gasparilla continues to this day as an annual event in Tampa although the current festival is much smaller than the Gasparillas of the 1920s. Gasparilla was a series of balls and parades with the young members of
Tampa society taking roles as members of royalty for the length of the festival. As the most celebrated part of Gasparilla, a King and Queen were selected each year, along with a full court of attendants to watch over the proceedings at the annual coronation ball and parade. Lowe role as dressmaker for the court involved the creation of a number of fine gowns for the coronation ball and other dances. She was also in high demand to create dresses for attendees of the ball. “If you didn’t have a Gasparilla gown by Annie,” a Tampa resident recalled in 1965, “you might as well stay home.”91 The “Annie Cone” dress shop was responsible for dozens of dresses worn at Gasparilla. The first Gasparilla court she outfitted in 1924 required a set of elaborate, Egyptian Revival themed costumes (Figure 19).
The court theme was inspired by the 1922 discovery of the Egyptian tomb of
Tutankhamun, and demonstrates the peaking interest in all things Egyptian that swept the country during this period.92 The costumes no longer exist, but the queen's Egyptian themed gown (Figure 20) was described in detail in the Tampa Morning Tribune:
The vivacious brunette beauty of Queen Sarah, of the House of Keller was much admired on this auspicious occasion when she wore an exquisite creation of white Mollo O' Crepe satin, a slender gown glittering with silver and rhinestones embroidered in sheafs of wheat. The gathered panel set low on the front of the skirt was repeated at the back by one placed slightly higher, which formed a triple train, that was held in place at the back with Mercury wings of rhinestones. The rounded neck, heavily beaded completed this beautiful gown.93
20 Queen Sarah Keller would later mention that she was enchanted by the way that the front of her gown, “gave much the same effect as Cleopatra’s robes.”94
The series of events that led to Lowe’s position as Court Couturier are unknown, although it is possible that her involvement was a result of the Lee family’s participation in the event. Josephine and Dempsey's son, LaMarcus, served as the Gasparilla King in the early 1920s and Nell Lee was the Gasparilla Queen in 1926.95 Early records about those years were destroyed in a fire at the headquarters of the Krewe, the Tampa Yacht
Club in 1929. This fire also destroyed any original documents relating to Lowe’s work.96
Lowe’s participation as the court couturier for Gasparilla between 1924 and 1929 can be confirmed through a Tampa Tribune article written in 1965.97 The 1925 court (Figure
21) used a Chinese theme, although the later courts would return to a loose pirate theme, with the men in glittering pirate costumes and the women in coordinating clothing in modern styles (Figure 22 and Figure 23). Nell Lee was the queen in 1926, and although the gown no longer exists and no pictures of the gown appear to exist, she described it later as showing, “the charm of another day, but…the feeling of the present mode.”98
The variety visible in the later court gowns shows the work of a designer who was always filled with ideas. Where did all of these designs come from? Six months in a
New York City dressmaking school was an unlikely source for such prolific inspiration and not even Lowe seemed to know exactly how she was finding her designs, “I used to say from God,” she told a reporter in 1965, “other than that, I do not yet know.”99
Lowe spoke warmly of her Gasparilla festival work, proudly mentioning to coworkers fifty years later that the Egyptian Revival costumes were a technical highlight of her career.100 Lowe’s Gasparilla work was especially highly regarded by participants
21 because of its high quality. One former customer explained that her gowns, like any garments with a theatrical purpose were, “tremendous show pieces---Gasparilla gowns have to be, you know. They must be effective when seen from afar.” Unlike typical costumes, however, the quality of Lowe’s dresses held up to close inspection, “Ann’s gowns were not only effective from a distance, but exquisite when seen close-up, when most gowns aren’t. The details were magnificent.”101
Two examples of early Gasparilla dresses by Ann Lowe are a part of the collection of the Henry B. Plant Museum in Tampa. A tunic length fragment of a beaded silk dress worn by Sara Keller at a 1924 Gasparilla Festival ball (Figure 24) and a well preserved gold and red beaded dress which was worn by Kathryn Broaddus in the 1926
Gasparilla court (Figure 4, Figure 25) give an unprecedented look at Lowe’s earliest work. The Broaddus dress is the earliest confirmed example of Lowe’s work. It can be seen in a composite photo (Figure 57) of the 1926 Gasparilla court, a year that was confirmed by the Tampa Tribune as one of Lowe’s years as court couturier. Therefore it is extremely exciting that the gown is in the collection of the Plant Museum, a small museum on the campus of the University of Tampa. As the earliest intact example of
Ann Lowe’s work, fifteen years earlier than the 1941 Trimingham wedding gown at the
Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this dress provides a valuable look at the quality of Lowe’s early designs.
The base fabric is a gold lamé, woven in a satin weave with red and metallic threads. The asymmetrical neckline (Figure 25) has one jeweled shoulder strap and a beaded border of red and clear seed beads. A large jeweled medallion (Figure 58) in the upper left of the bodice and a series of small medallions towards the bottom of the skirt
22 are connected with sprays of brilliants and single lines of red seed beads, beaded in a pattern reminiscent of tree branches or curling smoke. From viewing the interior of the dress, it can be determined that the beads are applied individually (Figure 59). The condition of the Broaddus gown is fair and the deterioration of fabric and the presence of loose beads can be expected on a garment that is more than 85 years old.
A sheer red lining (most likely made of silk) is present on the inside of the gown, although it has deteriorated in spots. The lamé has begun to thin and deteriorate. The weight of the beadwork on the fragile gold lamé fabric has resulted in some bead loss
(Figure 60), however it appears that 90 - 95% of the beads are intact. The gown may be too fragile to display on a dress form. It was recently donated to the Henry B. Plant
Museum by the Broaddus family and will be displayed once a year as part of the museum’s annual Gasparilla retrospective.
The beaded silk dress fragment (Figure 24) has been attributed to Lowe through the family of the original owner. This fragment is believed to be part of a dress worn by the Queen, Sarah Keller. This was not her presentation gown (Figure 20), but a dress worn to one of the other dances held during the festival. Although the dress does not have a label or any related documentation, it is very possible that it is a Lowe design.
Lowe designed Sara Keller’s Queen gown that year along with her wedding gown and it is very likely that she could have designed another dress for Keller to wear at one of the other Gasparilla parties that year.102
The ivory silk sheath is beaded with a three color floral design featuring pink flowers in several stages of bloom. In an attempt to verify the attribution of this garment, the quality of the beadwork on this example should be acknowledged as problematic.
23 The glass beads, in light pink, hot pink and sea foam green are strung on long threads.
Those threads are arranged in the shapes of flowers and leaves and then stitched to the fabric. When a thread is lost in any part of the design, substantial bead loss can occur and a section of thread hanging away from the fabric can be observed. This method of application for the beaded design does not match Lowe’s established beadwork method.
She was known for using the most reliable and labor-intensive methods possible to create her sophisticated beaded designs, and she trained her seamstresses to sew
“thousands of beads and sequins into intricate forms” by attaching the beads individually.103 One of her seamstresses would proudly recall the detailed work years later, while criticizing the style of beadwork used in this fragment in the process:
One Tampa matron said that her Gasparilla gown still has the bead work perfectly intact---though the material beneath has worn from age. When I mentioned this to Mrs. Ravannah, she observed, with understandable pride: “That’s natural. Today, if you pull the wrong thread on most beaded dresses, all the beads will fall off. That never happened with Ann Lowe’s dresses. Each was individually caught and fastened. But,” she added, “it was hard on the eyes.”104
The beads at the bottom of the sheath follow Lowe’s standard of individual bead application. Thirteen rows of bugle beads are individually applied along the border of the sheath. This represents many hours of seamstress labor.105
The silk fragment is heavily torn. Hundreds of small tears can be observed throughout. These small tears are likely to be a result of the weight of the beaded decoration and the fabric’s reaction to the stress of the tight stitches. The band of bugle bead decoration has separated from the dress in several areas.
Preparing for New York
When Lowe was ready to move to New York in early 1928 she brought $20,000 with her as seed money for her new shop. Multiple interviews explained that this money
24 was saved from Lowe’s work, but this is a staggering amount of money to earn from a business that did not have a physical storefront and did not place newspaper advertising or city directory listings.104 Along with the question of how one woman could earn such a large amount of money from nine years in her made-to-order dress business, there is a question of how Lowe’s husband would have regarded and handled this money.
Caleb West’s occupations during the period of 1919 to 1928 ranged from laborer to hotel bellman.105 The probability that he would have allowed Lowe to keep her earnings separate from the expenses of the household, when they represented many times the average African American family’s income (and even the income of white families in 1928 Tampa) is astounding and highly unlikely. Lowe did have a history of making independent decisions in regards to her career and marriage, so it is not out of the realm of possibility that she insisted that her earnings remain separate from the household finances.
The Lee family describes Josephine and Dempsey’s efforts to help financially with the move to New York by pooling their resources with those of two other affluent
Tampa families and giving Lowe money for her New York venture.106 Lowe’s account of the seed money changed from interview to interview. Sepia magazine stated that
Lowe opened her business “after accumulating $20,000.” The use of the word
“accumulated” could suggest a combination of Lowe’s savings and the contributions of her former clients.107 The Saturday Evening Post article states that she saved the money, but also describes Josephine Lee as Lowe’s “friend and patron” so it is possible that
Lowe mentioned the Lee family’s financial contributions to the reporter, who then neglected to mention it in his article. A 1976 Tampa Tribune interview quoted from a
25 citation she received from the Alpha Phi Alpha International Fraternity in New York
City stating that Lowe “opened her first salon with a borrowed $20,000.”108 Lowe probably did save a considerable amount of money, but several generous clients in
Tampa are likely to have contributed to the fund as well.
The state of the “American Fashion Designer” in 1928 was still very much a developing one. Lowe was walking into a challenging environment where she would need to convince future clients that her work could match the high quality dresses they ordered in France. Paris was the home of couture fashion. Work in the New York ready- to-wear market was plentiful but the couture business was in its infancy. Elizabeth
Hawes, another fashion designer who was returning to New York from France to begin her own couturier in 1928 described the New York fashion scene both women would enter in her autobiography Fashion is Spinach:
To my knowledge there were no couturieres in existence with the possible exception of Jessie Franklin Turner. She made tea gowns of her own design to order. Everyone else sold copies of French models…many women here who could afford to have clothes made-to-order buy very expensive ready-made clothes. This is largely due, I believe, to the absence of real couturieres.109
Josephine Lee was in full support of Lowe’s decision to leave for New York because she felt that Lowe “was too good to waste herself where she was.”110 The dream of New York City began to become a reality after a Tampa guest arrived to a Manhattan party in a hand-painted Lowe original with a floral motif. A group of New York socialites at the event appeared to agree with Mrs. Lee. “The charming wearer was besieged with questions as to who had fashioned this unusual frock, and the explanation resulted in a group of New York society women insisting that Annie be brought to their
26 midst, so that she might conveniently create similar smart things for their own wardrobes.”111
Lowe arrived in Manhattan with money, initiative and experience but her endeavor was missing an important element: professional connections. Any contacts she may have established during her brief stay in 1917 would have been out of date by 1928.
From the Saturday Evening Post account of her first year in business however, it does not appear that the group of New York Society matrons who encouraged Lowe to come to New York in the first place followed her arrival with much attention. Fashion moves quickly and it is possible that many of the women who admired the “unusual frock” by Annie Cone at a party the previous fall had found other designers to admire.112
Every customer, fabric vendor and professional relationship needed to be cultivated from scratch and for all intents and purposes, the designer who had completed hundreds of professional garments for elite members of Tampa society was starting over.
27 Chapter 2: Ann Lowe of New York City
Although Lowe would not leave for New York City until February 1928, preliminary arrangements for the move were announced in a five hundred-word article in a Tampa society column called ‘The Social Mirror’ during the previous November:
There is much “weeping and wailing and maybe gnashing of teeth” to use the old expression, among Tampa society maids over the fact that Annie Cone is going to New York City in February to make her future home. Annie has designed and made all the exquisite gowns worn at all the big weddings, Gasparilla and other social events for the past several years, and feminine society is wondering just how it will be able to survive the future social seasons without her assistance.1
The enthusiastic coverage given to the “Annie Cone” dress shop is especially impressive when the lapse of a professional presence for the shop in other surviving Tampa publications of the period is considered. The Polk Tampa City Directory listed an average of two-dozen dressmakers, both white and colored, in each edition throughout the 1920s, and Lowe was not listed among them. Lowe’s omission from the list could be seen as one reason to question her claim that “Annie Cone” was the most popular dress shop in
Tampa although the detailed look at Lowe’s professional influence in Tampa supports
Lowe’s account.
Indeed, the bond Lowe established with her customers made them feel that they were losing an important social partner as a result of her New York City aspirations. At the same time, they were excited to see Lowe’s career grow because they saw her as much more than the “colored woman dressmaker” Jacqueline Kennedy would describe years later. Nell Lee’s daughter, Nell Lee Greening, who was born in 1928 and lived on the Lee family estate in Thonotosassa during her childhood, first knew Ann Lowe through her family’s vibrant stories. As a little girl, she would get to know “Annie” in
28 person as the family continued regular contact and patronage of Lowe’s shop through the years. Greening recalled the relationship between Lowe and the Lee family with great warmth:
She was wonderful! My parents just loved her dearly—as a person, not just as a wonderful sewer. They helped her as much as they were able to, to go up there (New York), and they thought it was wonderful that she went and had the courage to go up there and be on her own…we were very proud of her. We loved her. She was a good friend of the family, we (the family) felt that way about her and we (the family) had been friends in Alabama.
Lowe never spoke publicly about the emotional impact of her transition from life in the deep South to the relative equality of New York City, but leaving a lifetime of discriminatory laws behind her was most likely a welcome change. Lowe may have outgrown Tampa by the late 1920s, and achieved the greatest amount of professional success available to her within the social constraints of the time. Her first taste of the city in 1917 fueled her dreams of becoming a Manhattan dressmaker and she was excited to try “to see one of those lovely New York society girls” in a Lowe creation.2 Aside from the glamour of the city, reestablishing her business in New York City made a great deal of financial sense. In Tampa, it is likely that a business like Lowe’s, run by an African
American but serving an all white clientele, even when funded by a white partner would have run into significant challenges in setting up a physical location within the white area of Tampa as late as the early 1970s. The climate of New York City was different. New
York was home to a wide variety of races and cultures and that diversity provided Lowe with business opportunities that would never have been available to her in Florida. Lowe dropped her married names upon moving to New York and adopted her professional name: Ann Lowe.
29 It is not clear if arrangements in New York went exactly as planned. Originally, the New York clients were put in charge of securing “a suitable location…for a modiste shop” that Lowe would “have entire charge of.”3 The reality of the situation, as described by the Post article, may have been less than ideal. “Miss Lowe rented a third-floor workroom on West 46th Street and limped along for a year, making few dresses. Then her money ran out.”4
The spring of 1928 was an unfortunate time to begin a new business, especially one that would rely upon an affluent clientele’s desire for luxury goods. The Post’s account suggests that Lowe’s “money ran out” just around the crash of 1929.5 The Great
Depression affected Lowe’s New York client base immediately, but a number of her
Tampa clients were not dramatically affected by early events around the crash.
Descendants of these citrus executives believe that the nature of the citrus industry insulated grove owners like the Lee family from the worst of the financial at first.6
Gasparilla continued with a few adjustments, and a number of Lowe’s Tampa clients held onto their way of life.7 Members of the Lee family came to her throughout the 1930s and
1940s when they needed an important dress and Lowe kept her promise to “make their choicest frocks just as of old, even if it is not quite so convenient for them as if she were in Tampa.”8 Lowe probably felt very fortunate to have their business, but scattered business from Tampa would not be enough to support an independent Manhattan dress shop. The cost of running her business in New York was high and Lowe was not accustomed to the expenses her new business required. Sepia magazine reported that she didn’t realize that her business was losing money until the end of that first year. Looking back on the situation Lowe admitted that she “devoted too little attention to economic
30 matters and concentrated on the work itself.”9 This would prove to be an ongoing problem for Lowe throughout her career.
The major houses like Hattie Carnegie and department stores like Saks Fifth
Avenue were not immune to the financial distress of the period, but they also had the capital and established clientele to remain in business. Smaller business had smaller financial cushions. Lowe and a number of the smallest and least established designers in
New York had the most to lose. Their clients, the wives and daughters of bankers and business owners, were no longer in the market for couture wardrobes. Some designers, like Elizabeth Hawes, stayed afloat in their own shops by reducing staff salaries dramatically and offering clothing to existing clients for whatever they could pay.10
Designers gave up their own showrooms and workspaces and sought any work they could find through the large fashion houses of the Garment District. Lowe recalled that she went to numerous shops during a long job search and asked for, “a place to work and some fabric.” She offered to “make the dresses for nothing. You pay me only if they sell.”11 An unnamed shop owner accepted her offer, and Lowe was back to creating a number of elaborate gowns of her own design, although the owner of each design house would receive the credit. Lowe recalled that her first gown sold immediately and many others followed.12
The success of this arrangement allowed Lowe to create similar working relationships with a number of established design houses throughout the Depression years. She would work a great deal during this period, for established houses such as
Hattie Carnegie, Chez Sonia (owned by Sonia Levienne) and Sonia Gowns (owned by
Sonia Rosenberg).13 This work allowed her to stay busy when many other independent
31 dressmakers were without work. Lowe’s income was probably not comparable to the money she earned during her years in Florida, but at least she was working. Her profit on each gown was nothing like the margin she enjoyed on the Gasparilla gowns she sold without the involvement of a third party and although her income may not have been substantial during these years, it was enough to keep her apartment in a fashionable section of Harlem. The success or failure of Lowe’s business affected not just her own life, but the lives of her family members including two other women, Ruth Williams, considered by Lowe to be an unofficially adopted daughter, and Tommie Mae Cole, a cousin from Alabama who had traveled to New York from Tampa to assist her.14 Their success relied upon steady work in the only field they knew.15 Lowe’s independent career was on hold, but the dressmakers of the West household continued to work and the women remained in New York. Her freelance work was also enough to keep her customers familiar with her presence in the city. To earn substantial profit however,
Lowe would need to find an equivalent to the plentiful annual business she experienced in Tampa. Gasparilla provided her with dozens of steady commissions each winter, and that kind of work steady, seasonal would be needed once again if Lowe had a chance of maintaining her own dress shop.
In Tampa, word of mouth was the only advertising she needed. Word of mouth was also becoming a powerful tool in the growth of Lowe’s New York career as her special occasion dresses were noticed by her customer’s friends and she was beginning to make helpful connections such as Polly Bush, a local socialite. Bush was a customer at
Lowe’s first New York shop. She thought that Lowe “was too good to be hidden away here” and she promised to introduce Lowe “to the right people.”16 Under Bush’s wing,
32 Lowe began to work for the most socially prominent families of the city. Her interviews would mention her long working relationships with the “Dupont, Auchincloss, Vander
Poel, Lodge and Hamilton” families and soon she would design exclusively for the families of the New York Social Register, and reestablish herself as a leader in extraordinary wedding gowns, while adding a new specialty to her business: the debut gown.17
The young ladies of the Social Register had an annual calendar of social commitments related to their work as members of the Junior League of New York and other charitable organizations. The wardrobe needs of each debutante provided a lucrative stream of income to her dressmaker. Even the most bare-boned wardrobe requirements for a debutante’s season added up to a large custom order. The required pieces, outside of the presentation gown were described by the New York Times as, “a grand ball gown, a simple ball gown, a good all-day suit and coat and two cocktail or tea- dance dresses.”18 Lowe’s clients set the social tone of each season, leading the pack in the latest fashions. They ordered much more than the basics to get them through the two or three month party season that the Saturday Evening Post described as the “Debutante
Whirl.”19 These multiple dress orders added up quickly, and the debut season would become an exceptionally profitable and reliable part of Lowe’s business.
There is evidence to show that Lowe designed under her own name as early as
1941. The earliest known example of a gown with an Ann Lowe label is an artificial silk wedding gown worn by Jane Tanner Trimingham.20 The gown (Figure 26) is also the earliest example of Lowe’s work in a major costume collection: the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is an excellent example of Lowe’s return to custom
33 work, and the type of work she completed for so many women in Tampa when she designed their gown to reflect their personality and interests.21 Jane Tanner’s interests included the island of Bermuda. Her family had business connections there, and the embroidery motifs Lowe selected, as described by the New York Times, related directly to these important ties, “The bride wore a gown of white satin, the skirt ending in an oval train. The neckline was embellished with white satin Bermuda lilies embroidered with seed pearls, continuing down the center panel in a design of stems.”22 In 1981, Mrs.
Trimingham remembered that the use of Bermuda Lilies, placed on the neckline and the sleeves, had been her own idea and that Lowe executed it with great skill. The gown also featured a twenty-foot train.23 This gown is significant in the collection of Lowe’s work because it serves as evidence that Lowe was working independently in the early 1940s.
Tanner’s attendants wore similar gowns, “in emerald green satin…designed along the same lines as the bride’s gown, with a double scallop forming slight trains. They wore also seed pearl Juliette caps of green tulle with shoulder length tulle veils”24
As Lowe’s professional accomplishments in the city increased, problems in her
personal life began to appear. Caleb West was more supportive of his wife’s career than
Lee Cone had been. By the time the couple married, Lowe had already established
herself as a leading dressmaker in Tampa. Lowe set up a workroom behind their home,
which suggests that West was sensitive to the logistical needs of her career.25 He also
moved to New York with Lowe, a show of cooperation that was in sharp contrast to Lee
Cone’s response when Lowe came home from that Dothan, Alabama department store
and told him about her chance to move to Florida and sew for the Lees.26 Lowe would
later describe the toll the demands of her work began to take on the family, saying that
34 Caleb told her “that he wanted a real wife. Not one who was forever jumping out of bed to sketch dresses.”27 She explained that although West was supportive, “he never did want me to sew. When he saw that dresses were my life I guess he gave up.”28 A series of legal notices placed in the New York Post between September 1941 and January 1942 indicate that West was seeking information about Lowe’s whereabouts in order to serve her with a lawsuit. Interestingly, the notices announce his search for “Annie Cone West” during a period when Lowe was already working under the name “Ann Lowe.” Caleb
West sued for divorce in Hartford, Connecticut on grounds of desertion. The divorce was granted on January 31, 1942. Lowe never spoke publicly about this situation.
By the mid 1940s, Lowe continued to work for other design houses but also maintained a steady list of independent clients which included Jacqueline and Lee
Bouvier and their mother, Janet Auchincloss, along with the wife and daughters of a prominent political figure of the day, C. Douglass Dillon.29 Joan Dillon recalled that
Lowe made the dresses she wore to New York parties during her teenage years.30 For the
Bouvier sisters, Lowe designed party dresses as well as their 1947 debut gowns (Figure
27).31 Later that year, while working as a designer for Sonia Gowns, Inc. Lowe was given a prestigious assignment for a Hollywood actress. Olivia de Havilland ordered a gown to wear to the Academy Awards, where she was nominated as Best Actress for her role in the 1946 motion picture, To Each His Own (Figure 28). Lowe was in charge of the design and created a strapless tulle gown with a vibrant hand painted and sequined floral motif. The completed gown was officially credited to the head of Sonia Gowns,
Sonia Rosenberg and when de Havilland won the Academy Award, her dress appeared in countless newspapers and movie theaters throughout the country. Promotional trailers
35 for de Havilland’s next film, The Snake Pit, also featured the actress receiving her
Academy award in this gown.32 The de Havilland gown was the most famous Ann Lowe original to date, but it was also a lost opportunity because the gown was created for another designer’s house. The Saturday Evening Post reported that the gown was featured in Vogue, with the editorial copy, “Only Sonia could design a dress like this one.”33 This would certainly be a disappointment to an up and coming dressmaker. Eight years later, however, Lowe’s work would make its way back into the pages of Vogue
(Figure 29), this time in a full-page photograph of Nina Auchincloss’ debut gown with a proper credit line.34
By the end of the forties, Lowe’s business had weathered the financial challenges of the Great Depression and the supply shortages of World War II. She had not become a prosperous business owner during this time by any stretch of the imagination, but the ability to stay solvent during these two difficult periods was an accomplishment for which any business owner could be proud. Young women who wore Ann Lowe
Originals for their debuts at nineteen were returning to Lowe a few years later for her help as they became engaged to be married, and this kind of growth put her in the position to open another shop. She partnered with Grace Stehli, a former customer and the wife of the owner of Stehli Silks, to open Ann Lowe, Inc. at 667 Madison Avenue.35
Ruth Williams, one of the young assistants who moved with Lowe from Tampa joined
Lowe as a dressmaker.36 Other positions were filled through classified ads in the New
York Times. The shop advertised for dressmakers and finishers throughout October
1950. “DRESSMAKER,” read one of the earliest known ads, “for fine custom dresses.
Apply Ann Lowe, Inc. 667 Madison Ave. Room 301”37
36 Grace Stelhi was a society matron with an interest in fashion design. Along with
her role at Ann Lowe, Inc. she operated her own shop on Long Island named Heide,
where she sold her own designs. Stelhi had a role in the business management of Ann
Lowe, Inc and hosted a fashion show for the shop at her estate in Mill Neck, Long Island
in May 1951:
Most gorgeous of the fashion shows was Friday when several hundred members of society braved the downpour to visit Hawk Hill, wondrous estate of Mr. and Mrs. Henry E Stehli…a huge white marquee was erected on the lawn close to the house and down through the center was the ramp where fair maidens and matrons of the top-drawer set showed the Heide and Ann Lowe creations to be worn this summer.38
It is likely that the Stelhi family’s business connections gave Lowe the ability to rent a space and begin a business in this location. This may have been a common arrangement at the time, with the artist bringing her skills to the business and the partner bringing her enthusiasm and affluent family connections. Elizabeth Hawes’ first shop in New York was funded along similar lines. A young daughter of an affluent New York family worked as the main partner while Hawes designed the clothing and the debutante’s family guaranteed their credit.39 The Stelhi family’s connections in the textile industry may have also been helpful in the acquisition of fabric and supplies, and possibly in bookkeeping. Lowe’s formal education ended somewhere around the eighth grade and a partner with formal business experience and the advantage of a quality education would be necessary if the shop had a true opportunity to succeed. She discussed the partnership in one article, suggesting that it dissolved shortly after the commission of gowns for
Jacqueline Bouvier’s fall 1953 wedding to John F. Kennedy because of tension between the partners. Lowe told the Saturday Evening Post that there were two partners in the shop, although neither is identified in the article, it is probable that this additional partner
37 was another member of the Stelhi Family, perhaps the college-aged daughter, Maggie, who was described in Newsday’s coverage of the Heide/Ann Lowe fashion show as also sharing an interest in fashion. One of Lowe’s partners “had been kind, the other shrill” and with this being the case, Lowe decided to, “set out on her own, and this time she was joined by her son Arthur, who kept her books and ordered her materials.”40
The pieces of Lowe’s career were beginning to align during the early 1950s, and
she was able to enjoy this success in her typical modest fashion. The happiness that her
career provided for her was more important to Lowe than any material displays of
wealth it could provide. Dressmaking was her life’s work, “I feel so happy when I am
making clothes,” she told a reporter in 1966, “that I could just jump up and down with
joy.”41 During this period she proudly “turned out an average of one thousand gowns a
year, had a staff of 35 and grossed $300,000 annually” although she continued to live
without frills, wearing her own designs and focusing on her work in the same apartment
on Manhattan Avenue.42
Female business owners along Madison Avenue were not uncommon, but Lowe
was probably the first African American woman to accomplish such a milestone.43
Surprisingly, Lowe’s accomplishments received few acknowledgements and very little
attention from the African American press. This period of invisibility within her own
community may be attributed to the intended audience for Lowe’s gowns. The
organizations behind the annual debut balls such as the Junior League of New York
were exclusively white, and the social circle of Lowe’s customers did not intersect the
circle of young African American women in the city.44 While the African American
press of the time did not notice Lowe’s work in any significant way, she wrote an
38 occasional fashion column for a local African American newspaper, The New York Age
in the early 1950s.45
Coverage of Lowe’s career in Sepia, a magazine intended for an African
American audience modeled in the style of Look, and Ebony chose not to highlight the lack of Lowe’s African American customers, but again, Lowe was presented as an impressive oddity, rather than a fashion designer that one of their readers could expect to hire. By announcing that she only worked for “families of the Social Register” Lowe was acknowledging an all white clientele. Lowe felt that Ebony’s audience was not her client base. This somewhat disturbing truth about her work was not critically explored by magazine writers of the period. A popular quote about Lowe’s career originated from
Lowe herself when she explained to Ebony that she was, “an awful snob. I love my clothes and I’m particular about who wears them. I am not interested in sewing for café society or social climbers. I do not cater to Mary and Sue. I sew for the families of the
Social Register.”46 This bold statement was not an exaggeration. The bulk of Lowe’s customers really did come from the Social Register, and Lowe was even listed in the
National Social Directory, an annual business directory used by its members. She was known to make gowns as gifts for her engaged employees, and sew for family members, but the only African American client who officially hired her for an order of gowns for her wedding was Elizabeth Mance, the daughter of a Washington, DC doctor.47 By the end of Lowe’s sixty-year career, her assistant, Ruth Williams Alexander “kept a copy of the Social Register in the glove compartment of her car to use as an address book for
Lowe’s customers.”48 Curiously, Ann Lowe gowns appeared in a travelling Fashion Fair fashion show run by the publishers of Ebony and Jet Magazines in 1967.49
39
Lowe’s dresses were selling to a growing group of elite (white) women throughout the country. Along with “Ann Lowe’s” on Madison Avenue, Lowe was also selling her custom gowns through several exclusive department stores throughout the
United States.50 Department stores served local client bases during the 1950s and 1960s.
These arrangements allowed her to expand the reach of her gowns away from the East
Coast and along with the New York stores her designs were available in I. Magnin,
Neiman Marcus, and Montaldos. Neiman Marcus was the best way to reach her client base in Texas and I. Magnin expanded Lowe’s work to California. When a Lowe debutante gown appeared in an editorial article in Vanity Fair in 1967, Lowe was credited as the designer but the dress was said to be available through Montaldos.51
Lowe was associated with high quality couture work for a select group of clients, and throughout the decade she would create debutante gowns for hundreds of attendees of the top balls in New York, all dressed, as one New York Times fashion writer of the period described after visiting Lowe’s studio “in one-of a kind gowns that look like kissing cousins at a distance.”52 Along with her custom work, wholesale designs became a part of her overall business plan by the middle of the 1950s. She advertised for dressmakers who were “capable of draping and making an expensive line of custom and wholesale gowns” in 1957 although more precise information about the details of this early wholesale work is not known.53
Lowe was best known for her bridal and debutante work, but she also designed special occasion gowns for high profile clients like Marjorie Merriweather Post, sole heiress to the Post Cereal fortune.54 Lowe proudly recalled an incident that occurred in
40 Paris when she and Mrs. Post attended the same fashion show. Lowe was visiting Paris on a trip as a reporter for the New York Age in the early 1950s. She made a habit of not identifying herself as a fashion designer during these trips, although the reasons behind her modesty are unclear. Upon running into Mrs. Post at one of these shows, she was deeply surprised to watch her client introduce her to acquaintances around the room as
“Miss Lowe, head of the American House of Ann Lowe.”55 It is notable that someone of
Mrs. Post’s social status would feel comfortable introducing her African American dress designer around a fashion house in Paris with a manner that suggested that Lowe’s work was of the same quality as French designers. Lowe recounted this story in several interviews and was clearly amused by the encounter.56
Mrs. Post had many occasions to wear formal clothes, and while she purchased gowns from a wide range high quality stores and designers such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Hattie Carnegie, her patronage of Lowe’s work is representative of the interest socialites of all ages held for Lowe Originals throughout the major metropolitan centers of the East Coast. This incident also suggests a warm working relationship between the two women, although specific examples of confirmed Lowe gowns in the Post collection have not been determined.
One gown at Hillwood has been identified as a possible Lowe design. The gown, which has been attributed to Lowe by Howard Kurtz, Hillwood’s textile curator, is an unmarked gray silk faille evening gown in the collection of Hillwood Estate, Museum and Gardens (Figure 30).57 Exact documentation about the gown’s designer is not known to exist, however the date of the gown can be confirmed as 1952 because of its appearance in the Douglas Chandor portrait of Mrs Post (Figure 31).58 Chandor was not
41 available to take the commission until the fall of 1952.59 Details of the gown’s construction suggest that it was designed specifically for the portrait and executed quickly.60 This gown was designed a few months before the wedding gown of Jacqueline
Bouvier Kennedy, and it displays many hallmarks of the “tremendous typical Ann Lowe gown” requested by Bouvier in her first meetings with Lowe in 1952.61 A comparison of design elements in both gowns and further discussion of Lowe’s work style support the gown’s attribution.
The Post evening gown is made from gray silk faille. The fabric is thick with a small waffle weave (Figure 32a) and its selection would have been helpful in supporting the sculptural detail of the scrolls that are used on the skirt and bodice. Hillwood’s curatorial file for the gown, prepared by Kurtz, describes the characteristics. “The portrait neckline is ruched and pleated at the center of the bodice and tucked scrolls create the small cap sleeves. The overskirt is decorated with six large versions of the tucked scroll motif.”62 Several details of the Post gown suggest that Ann Lowe was responsible for its design. The gown features a portrait neckline, the most popular neckline used in Lowe’s most intricate ball gowns. Several of the gowns in the collection of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art feature a portrait neckline. The portrait neckline of this gown (Figure 33) shares a strong resemblance with the portrait necklines of Jacqueline Bouvier’s 1947 debut gown (Figure 27) and 1953 wedding dress (Figure 1). Lowe was known for selecting expensive and high quality fabrics. The body of this fabric makes it a perfect choice to enhance the gown’s sculptural details. The Kennedy wedding gown features unusual bands of circular tucking, which is also enhanced through the use of a silk fabric with a heavy body. Lowe was known for her unusual decorative techniques, which were
42 inspired by the work of her grandmother, Georgia. Georgia, whose freedom had been purchased by her husband in 1860, worked as an independent dressmaker during the Civil
War, when luxury goods throughout the South were scarce. Dressmaking techniques used during that period created dramatic elements with the economical use of fabric.63 The pleated scrolls on the Post gown (Figure 32b) are also created through a unique process.
It is likely that a more conventional northern trained dressmaker of the period would create this type of design through the use of a standard appliqué, stitching an additional piece of fabric (already tucked and stitched into the desired shape) to the overskirt to create each dimensional motif. The technique used by this dressmaker involves a sophisticated series of cuts, tucks and stitching to the original fabric of the overskirt.
These techniques were executed from the interior of the skirt (Figure 32c). No additional fabric has been applied to create the heavy sculptural design. It is possible that this kind of technique developed out of a need to reduce the amount of fabric used. The ruched detail of the bodice is created with a series of gathers (Figure 32d). The use of gathers
(instead of pleats) is another 19th century method practiced in the Southern United States that allowed for a more economical use of fabric.64 Lowe had been able to turn fabric scraps into realistic flowers since she was a small child, and it is conceivable that a dressmaker who developed those kinds of sophisticated decorative methods would have used this style of decoration.
Even with all of these connections, a few unexplained features could be used to form an argument against the Lowe attribution. First, the Post gown does not have a dressmaker’s label. Lowe dresses were not always labeled therefore an unlabeled gown can still be a Lowe gown. The 1964 wedding gown of Ann Copeland, which is confirmed
43 to be an Ann Lowe gown, also does not have a label. Second, while Lowe gowns were celebrated for their impeccable finishing, the finishing techniques used on the Post gown are extremely rough. A look at the inside of the bodice (Figure 34) shows that the dress was unlined and features many exposed seams and raw edges (Figure 35). When compared to the bodices of two gowns that will be discussed in Chapter 4, (Figure 38 and
Figure 39), the interior of the Post gown appears to be unfinished. The number of raw seams present is alarming if this dress is to be identified as the work of someone known for creating gowns sewn with such “elaborate construction (in each) bodice so that the wearer need never use extra undergarments.”65 Lowe was known for finishing the seams of her work “with delicate white lace.”66 The boning (Figure 36) on the Post gown is exposed in some areas while carefully lined with additional gray silk faille in others.
Although the use of cross stitches on the grosgrain ribbon covering the boning (most visible on Figure 37) is consistent with the stitching used on the lining of later examples of Lowe’s work (Figure 38), the overall raw finish is problematic. The detail of the overskirt is also unlined, and the raw edges of the scrolls are visible from the underside.
The Kennedy wedding gown, which is a confirmed example of Lowe’s work, also features the heavy use of sculptural detail. It has a thick lining of “two to three layers including buckram” that covers the unfinished side of the design.67 Finally, the Post bodice also shows signs of being taken in under both arms while Lowe was known for fitting her gowns in a nearly flawless manner. The possibility of needing to alter a Lowe gown after its final delivery was unlikely.
The Post gown, however, was ordered for a very specific purpose, and further exploration into the busy schedule of the portrait artist may support the Lowe connection.
44 Correspondence between the Post family and the artist’s agent suggest that Chandor’s schedule appeared to be uncertain.68 In that case, a dress that looked finished on the outside was probably the best that could be completed on short notice. It is doubtful that
Post ever intended to wear the dress for anything but a portrait sitting. Marjorie
Merriweather Post loved clothing, and her wardrobe was exclusively couture. Mrs. Post was also very interested in documenting her life through photographs and no photographs of Post in this gown (either in newspaper clippings or family albums) have been discovered. It is highly unlikely that a stylish woman like Mrs. Post would want to wear a gown memorialized in her self-portrait to any event at a later date.69 If this dress was only created for a portrait sitting and it was never actually worn in public, the incomplete interior finishing and rough fit begin to make sense. A couture dress was needed quickly, and Lowe may have been the only designer in her class who was up to the challenge.
During her Tampa years she was able to create a gown in a day, “as she did for a number of young women who awoke in the morning with a yen for a new frock, went downtown to buy material and bring it to Ann’s home, and by nightfall had another original.”70 Even the Kennedy wedding dress needed to be completely recreated within one week when a water pipe burst in Lowe’s studio overnight and destroyed most of the gowns for the
Kennedy wedding.71 A team of seamstresses worked overtime to finish them.72 The wedding gown was neatly finished on the inside and labeled with an Ann Lowe label, most likely because of the great importance of the event.73 On the Post gown, the finishing was probably the place where Lowe cut corners to save time.74 The gown’s decorative elements may have also been designed for quick completion. Large scroll designs created a striking visual design that covered a lot of surface area and were
45 relatively quick to construct. They would provide an effective point of interest when interpreted in a painting.
Confirming this gown as the work of Ann Lowe represents an exciting area of possible future scholarship. Supporting documents about the gown’s commission or payment would need to be uncovered in order to make a definitive identification about the couture dressmaker who was behind this gown’s creation. A thorough study of Mrs.
Post’s wardrobe may reveal other examples of Lowe’s work. Shortly after Mrs. Post’s death in 1973 her closets were a part of a large renovation at Hillwood and Mrs. Post’s clothing was placed into storage trunks. Mrs. Post’s clothing collection was documented at Hillwood several years after the family’s documents were transferred to an archive at the University of Michigan. The textile curators at Hillwood studied these gowns years later, and moved the garments from their storage trunks.75 The definite attributions of other designers in the Post clothing collection, such as Hattie Carnegie and Saks Fifth
Avenue have been possible because of the presence of labels. It is not possible to confirm the Post gown as the work of Ann Lowe at this time, however the details described in this chapter create a very strong case in favor of the Lowe attribution.76
The heavily sculpted details present in the Post gown could signal a connection to
Jacqueline Kennedy’s Kennedy wedding gown. The Kennedy gown was designed about six months later. Its style is in sharp contrast to the simple “Jackie Look” established by
Mrs. Kennedy during the height of her fame. In the early 1960s, Mrs. Kennedy was known for her sophisticated and simple fashion sense with bright colors and classic lines.
She used a small group of American designers including Oleg Cassini in order to create this look. These designers also produced American made copies of French designs during
46 her White House years when the clothing she selected for her formal events during the late 1940s and early 1950s were quite different. That iconic sixties look is so closely associated with Mrs. Kennedy that it is difficult for people to reconcile the fact that she would actually request a dress as highly styled as her wedding gown.
By the early 1950s, Jacqueline Bouvier was a fashion forward college student.
She was the winner of the prestigious Prix de Paris contest at Vogue magazine in 1951, a contest judged on fashion essays and a suggested magazine layout for an entire issue of the magazine submitted by each student, with a prize of a year to work in the Vogue Paris office. Although she turned down this prize, she was familiar with the top fashions of the day, and looked forward to working with dressmakers who could help her to achieve her desired look. One of these dressmakers, Mini Rhea, was located in the Georgetown area of Washington.77 Rhea described the styles Jackie preferred during the late 1950s, stating that Jackie “did not like to get the effect with side drapes or bunching of material because that would ruin the simple lines she preferred. She did not wear fluffy things—she didn’t wear “buttons and bows”…she didn’t like ruffles.”78 From this description, Lowe’s gown was the antithesis of Jackie’s look. Ms. Rhea sewed a number of simple shift dresses for
Jackie’s everyday wear during this period. She felt that the wedding gown was much too complicated for her client:
the wedding dress has tremendous ruffles and circles of ruffles repeated all around the voluminous skirt. These almost endless ruffles were what I most objected to. I counted eleven rows of ruffles around the bottom of the dress and above them were large concentric circles of ruffles which diminished at the center, where there were sprays of flowers…. The dress couldn’t have been fancier. But I had the feeling that Jackie was trying to please everyone---to dress according to everyone’s idea of a bride.79
47 Kennedy historians claim that the selection of the dress design was heavily influenced by Joseph Kennedy’s political aspirations for his son, John. A traditional dress created by a “modest” African American dressmaker hit a non-threatening, progressive note, favored by the Democratic Party at the time.80 In reality, while Joseph Kennedy’s influence was important, Jackie requested the dress design herself, following the lines of the Lowe debutante gown (Figure 27) she wore in 1947. At early sketch meetings described in the Saturday Evening Post, Jackie’s input was clear, “I want a tremendous dress,” she told Lowe, “a typical Ann Lowe dress.” Miss Lowe reached into her childhood memories and sketched an old-fashioned ball gown like one her mother had made for a Montgomery belle.”81
At the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, the fragile condition of this gown has prevented it from being displayed in recent years. A full sized replica (Figure 1b) was created for the library in 2004. Interestingly, the replica uses paper instead of silk. The artist, Isabella de Borchgrave, specializes in full sized historic dresses made from paper.82
The replica includes all of the decorative elements of the original gown as closely as possible. It is hoped that the paper version will be more suitable for long-term public display, allowing generations of visitors to view the dramatic effect of Lowe’s design long after the original silk gown is too fragile to be displayed.
48 Chapter 3: “A Major Fashion Designer”
The years between 1955 and 1958 may have been the peak of Lowe’s
independent career. She was occasionally quoted in the New York Times as an expert
on debutante style and her business continued to grow. By 1955 Lowe moved her
business to 973 Lexington Avenue and renamed the shop Ann Lowe Gowns.
Classified ads provide an intriguing look into the growth of Lowe’s business and
suggest that the number and types of commissions had increased dramatically by this
time. She asked for Drapers who were “experienced only, high priced evening
gowns, must be fast: high salary,” and Dressmakers who were “capable of draping
and making an expensive line of custom and wholesale gowns.”
A Gasparilla court gown in the collection of the Henry B. Plant Museum in
Tampa, Florida, attributed to Lowe, was created in 1957 and follows the style tradition of other Lowe gowns from this period. It is attributed to Ann Lowe through oral history information supplied by the family of the original owner. The dress does not have a label or documentation linking it to Lowe’s New York shop, but it follows the style of other Lowe gowns very closely and features the detailed beadwork and creatively executed floral motifs that are both Lowe trademarks. The structure of the gown also appears to match a confirmed example of Lowe’s work, the 1964 wedding gown of Ann Copeland. The Plant museum gown is a golden cream toned silk with periwinkle blue tulle, beaded floral motifs and tulle pussy willows. The gown features a portrait neckline, lined with 8 layers of tulle (Figure 61). The all over beaded design begins at the bodice, with a number of heavily beaded floral medallions, also decorated with (glass or plastic) drop pearls.
49 The beadwork represents pussy willow branches reaching over the bodice and long skirt (Figure 62). Small tufts of blue tulle (Figure 63) are attached individually to represent pussy willow blooms. There are an estimated 40 clusters of pussy willows on the gown, on the front and back of the bodice and the front of the skirt, each with four to eight pussy willow blooms in a cluster. Some bead loss can be observed.
There are also spots (Figure 64) where replacement beading has been applied with clear seed beads to replace the original clear glass beads with a metallic (possibly silver) core. This replacement beading was carefully applied to follow the original lines of the work. The original beaded design was applied individually, a technique that added to the expense of the gown, but has preserved the integrity of the design.
The bead loss has occurred individually as stitches lost their strength over time. A few small holes (Figure 65) can be observed at the hem of the gown as well as some minor deterioration of the silk fabric on the edge of the cap sleeves (Figure 66).
Confirming this Dress as the Work of Ann Lowe:
The portrait neckline and detailed execution of the floral theme present in the design of this gown are hallmarks of Ann Lowe’s work. Another Lowe gown with tulle pussy willows has not been discovered, but the labor-intensive design to turn bits of tulle and sprays of glass beads into a garden of pussy willows is definitely the kind of method that could have been perfected by Lowe as a little girl using scraps of fabric from her mother’s workroom. The beading has been applied individually, following Lowe’s established method. The strongest evidence to confirm this work as
50 the work of Ann Lowe however is in the construction of the bodice. When viewed side by side with the Ann Copeland wedding gown three important similarities in construction can be observed.
A comparison of an interior view of the Jewel Court bodice (Figure 39) and an interior view of the Copeland Wedding Gown bodice reveals a number of similarities.
The materials used in both bodices appear to be very similar. They are both lined in cream colored silk. The waist tape and elastic are of the same gauge and color.
Placement and type of elastic used in the bra cups and the lower strap are similar. The placement of the ribbing also appears to follow the same template. White grosgrain
(waist tape) ribbons used across the bottom of both bodices are tacked in using a cross stitch.
These two gowns share enough similarities in their construction methods,
design and decorative themes to confirm the Jewel Court gown as a work of Ann
Lowe. A comparison of the interior of other Lowe bodices from the period (for
example, the 1950s Ann Lowe ball gowns in the collection of the Costume Institute
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) may provide further evidence to support this
observation.
The Jewel Court gown was produced as Ann Lowe’s work was reaching its
highest point. Her dresses were in demand throughout New York and hundreds of
young women were making their social debut each year in an Ann Lowe Original.1
Her business was thriving, even without the advantages of a partnership with the
Stehli family.
51 When Arthur Cone died in a car accident in 1958 however, Lowe’s luck changed dramatically. Arthur maintained a watchful eye over the financial aspects of his mother’s business immediately after the partnership with the Stelhi family dissolved at the beginning of the decade, and at the time of his death Ann Lowe’s
Gowns began to have severe financial problems. It appears that Lowe did not hire a financial advisor or bookkeeper after Arthur’s death.2 Maintaining her own business quickly become too much for Lowe; Glaucoma was advancing in her right eye and she was quickly losing track of her bills and taxes. By 1960, Lowe owed thousands of dollars in supplies and back taxes, forcing her to close.3
A dressmaker of Lowe’s status would not be able to operate without a workroom. Fortunately, the quality of Lowe’s professional reputation within New
York meant that Lowe would not be without a professional salon space for long. Her financial affairs prevented her from reopening her own salon, but as word spread that one of New York Society’s most prolific designers was out of business, a prestigious opportunity soon appeared. Saks Fifth Avenue presented an offer for a partnership in their exclusive boutique, the Adam Room, and Lowe agreed to become its head designer. The Adam Room was an established department on the fifth floor of the flagship store. It specialized in custom and ready to wear debutante and bridal gowns.4 Promotional materials featuring a pen and ink portrait of Lowe in profile were produced to announce the arrival of New York Society’s beloved designer:
“Saks Fifth Avenue takes pride in announcing that the Debut and Bridal Gown
Collection created by Ann Lowe can now be found exclusively at The Adam Room”
(Fig 41).5 This was a prestigious step forward, with many possibilities for Lowe’s
52 growth but the details of the arrangement, described in the Saturday Evening Post a few years later highlight Lowe’s inexperience with financial matters. Her position at
Saks was based upon a contract that was heavily weighted in the department store’s favor:
Saks provided the workroom, and Lowe bought her own materials and paid her own staff; in turn, Saks bought Miss Lowe’s output. Most of her customers did follow her, but the arrangement was doomed. “Not counting the dollars going into a dress but just the beauty that came out of it,” Miss Lowe says, “I didn’t realize until too late that on dresses I was getting $300 for, I had put about $450 into it.6
In the same way that Lowe looked only at the beauty going into her designs, instead of the cost, she was unable to predict the additional financial burden represented by the Saks offer. She was released from the burden of managing the rent of a showroom and workspace. However, in exchange for that freedom, she was introducing a third party into established relationships with her most lucrative clients and lowering the amount of profit she received for each gown. From the outside, the arrangement may have looked like a golden partnership, but it became a precarious arrangement for an independent designer.
This partnership made excellent financial sense for the department store. For the small cost of maintaining a workspace in the building on Fifth Avenue and probably providing credit backing for Lowe, they received high quality couture work with a Saks Fifth Avenue label.7 In addition to a coveted list of young women from the Social Register, who would be perfect customers for future services.8 Investing in an elderly designer who was become increasingly frail may appear to be an unsteady arrangement, but realistically, Saks had very little risk in the partnership. In their
53 worst scenario, if the health of their head designer declined and she became unable to produce her designs, other seamstresses at Saks would be able to complete them.
Specific conditions of the Saks arrangement were discussed by Lowe herself in at least one interview during the 1960s, and also described by a former employee including the fact that Lowe may have been responsible for her own salary.9 If Lowe agreed to cover all of the expenses related to each gown as well as her own compensation, while releasing her valuable customer list to a previous competitor, all in exchange for a place to work, she was making a huge financial error. It seems that
Lowe’s talents were being exploited, and it is difficult to believe that the decision makers at Saks did not understand that the compensation they were offering was uneven. It is also possible that these terms were the first offer from Saks. Their lawyers were starting low and were prepared to negotiate if Lowe insisted on more profitable terms. The clause allowing Lowe to keep her own private clients was most likely negotiated by Lowe, but it may have been the only detail of the original offer that she sought to change. The logistics involved in working privately with clients within her only showroom at Saks are unclear.10
It is not known how many people Lowe employed during this period, but the volume of her business required multiple assistants. Several employees who were with Lowe during her Saks period have been identified in previous articles. Her sister
Sallie, her assistant Esther Provanzano and a sketcher named Andrew Koval were all identified as employees.11 Presumably, the Adam Room marked up the final price of the Lowe gowns on display considerably, and the final prices for the gowns were probably closer to, if not actually higher than the actual amounts of Lowe’s cost.12
54 There were positive aspects to the Saks partnership. With Saks as a home base, Lowe could continue to make the kinds of gowns that she loved without compromising for the sake of quality. Presumably backed by Saks’ credit, Lowe could continue to purchase high quality materials, such as silk imported from France, from the top suppliers in the city and work in a top quality workroom with an adequate number of staff. She was also able raise her professional profile through the status and reputation of the Saks name.
When John Kennedy became the President-elect that November, the fashion world went into a frenzy in an attempt to uncover the designer who would be responsible for Mrs. Kennedy’s inaugural gown. Lowe’s connection to Saks along with her relationship with the Auchincloss family brought her into the exciting circle of designers who might be considered for one of the most sought after commissions of the year. Lowe did not speak publicly about her hopes of returning to work as a designer for Jacqueline Kennedy, although an item about Kennedy’s inaugural gown and Ann Lowe turned up in Lee Mortimer’s syndicated newspaper gossip column,
New York Confidential in the middle of December:
Most disappointed gal in town is a young but nationally known Negro named Ann Lowe who designs for Saks Fifth Ave. Adam Room. Ann, who created Jackie Kennedy’s bridal gown, had been led to understand by the Kennedy family circle that she was to do the inaugural gown. But at the last minute Bergdorf Goodman got it instead. There were rumors that Oleg Cassini was to do it for Bergdorf, which that firm denies. And meanwhile Ann is heartbroken. She says she has letters concerning the matter…”13
Lowe was capable of creating exquisite gowns with the kind of simple lines and decoration (Figure 47) that defined Mrs. Kennedy’s style during this period, but it is doubtful that Kennedy would have returned to work with her. Ann Lowe Originals
55 were a part of a different era in Mrs. Kennedy’s life, and it is doubtful that a woman who was entering the most demanding period of her life to date would step backwards and dress in fashions created by a woman who had originally been a part of her life during her teen years.14 Adding to the argument that Lowe may have never been under consideration for the gown is an article from the November 22, 1960 Los
Angeles Times:
The wife of the President elect, who is known for her interest in art and her ability to sketch, said she has sent suggestions to Bergdorf on style, color and material of the dress. She also sent rough sketches of her own. The New York specialty store will submit designs to Mrs. Kennedy in accordance with her sketches.
The inaugural events represented a turning point in the life of the Kennedy family, and a new fashion designer would be a part of this transition. Despite the denial from
Bergdorf Goodman, Oleg Cassini, an American designer with experience in Europe, did design the inaugural gown for Mrs. Kennedy for Bergdorf’s.15 He also went on to work as Kennedy’s designer, creating copies of French designs in a successful attempt to quiet critics of the first ladies expensive “European” tastes. It should be noted that the authenticity of the information presented in a gossip column cannot be verified at this point, and should be thoroughly questioned, although the level of detail involved in this item, and the reference to correspondence with the Auchincloss family suggests its accuracy. Substantial press coverage about Lowe’s work on the
Kennedy wedding dress would not appear until after the President’s death and few people in the media would have a reason to know about Lowe’s ties to the
Auchincloss family at this time.
56 Another example of opportunities available to Lowe as a result of her Saks connection can be found in Omaha, Nebraska, at the Durham Museum. Nebraska is a surprising place to find a set of two original Ann Lowe ball gowns (Figure 42) and their history provides a rare look at designs produced during the Saks Fifth Avenue period. The gowns were commissioned as part of a set of 33 ball gowns created for the Ak-Sar-Ben Coronation Ball. The Queen gown (Fig 43) is still in the private collection of Connie Cowdery O’Neil, the 1961 Ak-Sar-Ben Queen.
When a group of executives from Omaha, Nebraska visited New York in the final stages of their search for a dress designer who could successfully handle a commission for their city’s most prominent cotillion, the Saks connection was probably key to Lowe’s selection as the court couturier. The search process was a part of the lengthy preparations for the annual ball described in the Omaha World-Herald,
“Designers submit sketches of original dress creations, which are studied by the men’s and women’s ball committees. Sample dresses then are made, and the chairmen of the two committees make a trip in the spring to view the models and make the choice.”16 The result, after close to a year of preparation from the committee was a set of thirty-three extraordinary tulle gowns in seven designs, nearly theatrical in their overall design, with intricate silver beading. These gowns were the highlight of the 1961 Ak-Sar-Ben Coronation Ball. The local press covered every design detail of every gown, identifying each participant by name and indicating which style of gown they wore to the ball. The Ak-Sar-Ben committee members were proud of their connection to a sophisticated New York designer, her race did not appear to be important:
57 If the gowns worn by the Ak-Sar-Ben countesses and princesses put the audience in mind of an eastern debutante cotillion it’s understandable. Ann Lowe of New York, court couturier is no newcomer to custom designing for debutantes and their social register mothers. Lowe originals were worn by Jacqueline Kennedy at her debut and wedding.17
The group of thirty-three gowns in the Ak-Sar-Ben Coronation Ball order serves as a compelling example of the problems Lowe experienced in running a profitable business. The prices the Ak-Sar-Ben group paid for their gowns are not known, but the ball was an expensive event. Ak-Sar-Ben was known as “Omaha’s most important civil and social affair” and no expense was spared.18 The committee expected couture dresses ordered from a top designer in New York City to have a high cost.19 Although they were unaware of the financial details of Lowe’s partnership, the prices they paid for each gown were most likely established by Saks, with Lowe receiving the equivalent of wholesale compensation on the order.
The Chairman of the ball addressed his thank you letter to Lowe at 9 East 53rd
Street, her Saks office. This suggests that this order was commissioned through
Saks.20 If this was the case, the Ak-Sar-Ben committee paid the retail price to Saks directly for the gowns that Saks purchased from Lowe at a wholesale rate. Lowe was well known for undercharging in these kinds of arrangements, and at Saks, she often sold dresses at a loss. Lowe’s pattern of undercharging was not exclusive to her work with Saks, one client from her private salon revealed happily to the Saturday Evening
Post that Lowe, “charged seventy dollars a piece for bridesmaid dresses that should have cost at least two hundred, but that’s how she is.”21
Lowe did take some steps during the design of the Ak-Sar-Ben gowns in an attempt to lower costs. Instead of using silk, the Ak-Sar-Ben gowns were made from
58 French nylon tulle. Large amounts of fabric were needed for each gown, however and each dress used twelve layers of fabric and a number of petticoats over hoops.22 The high level of hand beading she designed for thirty-three gowns was an expensive design decision. The seven dress designs were heavily beaded with sequins and
“silver bugle beads and rhinestones” in the time consuming and very detailed style that was an Ann Lowe trademark.23 There were four styles of princess gowns (four copies of each style were produced) and two styles of countess gowns (eight copies of each style were produced). Each gown design had its own beaded motif. The Queen gown was the most ornate of the set and the most expensive:
Literally hundreds of yards of white French net, most of it finer than the sheerest chiffon, went into the queen’s gown, custom designed for her by Ann Lowe…the gown itself consisted of 12 layers of net hand embroidered in 60 different motifs with silver and crystal bugle beads, rhinestones, pearls and cut-crystal pendants.24
Connie Cowdery O’Neil recalled that her dress “had a separate under skirt that was three tiers of gathered net to make it stand out like it did.” In order to fit into her car on her way to the ball, a number of the petticoats had to be removed.25
Sixty beaded patterns were used on the queen’s skirt (Fig 5). These were described as snowflake, leaf and floral motifs in “silver and cut crystal.” There was also heavy hand beading on the bodice and cap sleeves, indicating dozens of hours of work for Lowe’s staff.26 If Lowe lost an average of $150 on each dress that she sold through Saks, the Ak-Sar-Ben order, which should have been a jewel in Lowe’s body of work, quickly turned into a financial quagmire. Undercharging for the 33 gowns in this order would create a total loss of $4,950, and it is very likely that the loss was actually greater.
59 If Lowe was earning similar losses on her other work, this could easily explain the $9,275.06 that Saks claimed that she owed to them during her bankruptcy proceedings in 1963.27 If she lost money with each dress order, it is difficult to see how she was covering her own living expenses, let alone the operating costs of her
Adam Room salon. Lowe’s bankruptcy file provides a rare look at the details of her financial situation. There were ten claimants listed in the file. Five of these claimants were companies that sold fabric and other dressmaking supplies. Three claimants were related to taxes and unemployment. These suggest that Lowe was still attempting to care of the financial details of the business herself. One claimant filed for $150 of missed salary. Saks Fifth Avenue (listed as doing business as Saks & Co) was the largest claimant. The size of their claim suggests that Saks may have advanced money to Lowe to pay staff salaries, material costs or her own living expenses.
The financial problems of 1962 were just the beginning of Lowe’s troubles.
Lowe left Saks at some point during that year and reopened in a small workspace farther down 53rd street. Unfortunately, the majority of Lowe’s employees chose to continue with Saks because they could pay more than Lowe was able to offer.28 A few employees attempted to move with Lowe, but returned to Saks when Lowe’s financial problems affected the reliability of their salaries. Only her sister, Sallie, stayed by her side.29
A strong staff was an absolute necessity for Lowe at this point. Although she began her career sketching dress after dress, her increasingly poor eyesight made drawing impossible and severely limited her sewing capability. “I’ve had to work by
60 feel” she admitted, “but people tell be I’ve done better feeling than others do seeing.”30 Without a staff to sketch and take up the bulk of the sewing, running a shop would be impossible. Lowe’s sketcher and chief assistant remained at Saks and Lowe was unable to hire new and highly trained workers who could meet the challenge of a high volume couture shop. “I couldn’t fill my orders,” she admitted. “Things went from bad to worse.” When this shop closed, Lowe “ran sobbing into the street…the tears wouldn’t stop.”31 Shortly after this, Lowe’s right eye, which had been heavily damaged by Glaucoma, was removed. Lowe had to stop working completely.32
After a period of rehabilitation, Lowe became a designer for Madeline
Couture, a dress shop in New York City. At Madeline Couture, Lowe was able to have a fashion show where former customers did the modeling.33 Shortly after the show, Lowe began to have problems with her other eye. Her attempts to continue working with a severe cataract in her only eye led to embarrassing attempts to cover up her problems:
Terrified to lose her eye, she tried to bluff. “Now here’s a design I think you’ll like.” She would say to a customer, picking up a sketch and brining it close to her eyes. “Oh my goodness,” she would add brightly, “Isn’t that ridiculous! I’m holding this sketch upside down!” The bluff worked through this past spring. She gave up her job at the dress shop in March (1963).34
Lowe was completely unprepared for retirement. She had no savings, and no way of paying her living expenses without working. The surgery she needed to restore sight to her only eye was high risk. It could possibly destroy whatever sight she still had in her left eye and a number of surgeons refused to take the chance. With the help of her previous clients she eventually found a surgeon who would attempt to remove the cataract, “If I can’t design dresses” she told him, “I’d rather fly off the Empire State
61 Building.” The doctor donated his services and covered the costs of the operating room.35 The August 1964 operation restored sight to Lowe’s left eye and amazingly, she prepared her business again. She contacted her previous customers through postcards---500 handwritten postcards, according to the Post. The campaign worked and Lowe was back to sewing for a number of her previous customers. She continued to create wholesale designs and maintained her close and personalized working style with her couture clients.
62 Chapter 4: The Client Experience
What was it like to be a client at Ann Lowe’s Gowns? A client’s experience depended on her level of interest and influence in the process. Three former clients of
Lowe had very different experiences during their dressmaking process, revealing Lowe’s flexibility and professionalism. An examination of commissions for The Duchess Joan de
Mouchy (formerly Joan Dillon), Pickett Huffines, and Ann Bellah Copeland will provide a closer look at Ann Lowe’s professional working style.
Lowe’s earliest New York connections began through the mothers of the city’s debutantes. The Duchess Joan de Mouchy recalled that Lowe designed for her family during the late 1940s and early 1950s when she was growing up in New York City. Her father, C. Douglas Dillon was active in politics, and became the United States
Ambassador to France in 1952, therefore the duchess’ “memories of Ann Lowe and her dresses stopped in 1952 to be exact.” but before that, her mother ordered the clothes from
Ann Lowe and appreciated working with her because, “She would tell (Lowe) exactly what to do and Ann Lowe would do it. Ann Lowe made our evening dresses for New
York dances for instance.” Dillon was an active member of New York Society, and she and her sister needed a number of dresses throughout their teenage years. Lowe mentioned her connection to the Dillon family in several interviews, telling one story to
Ebony involving Joan, an Ann Lowe ball gown and the legendary fashion designer,
Christian Dior:
Miss Lowe’s clothes have traveled over the world. At a ball in Paris, Christian Dior greeted Joan Dillon, daughter of our Ambassador to Paris with, “Who made this gown?” When Miss Dillon answered the dress was made by Ann Lowe, Dior said, “Give her my love.” Recalls Miss Lowe, “I had tea with him later in Paris.”1
63
As can be expected over a period of more than sixty years, the memory of the gowns worn during this period of the Duchess’ life have faded for her, and the gowns themselves are no longer intact. The styles of the gowns were preferred by her mother, “I was in my early teens when Ann Lowe dressed us,” she recalled when acknowledging that she had very little memory of this time or any particular affection for the Lowe gowns she wore, “and it was my mother who was in charge, not me.”2 The young
Jacqueline Bouvier appeared to have a similar relationship. The connection began when her mother, Joan Auchincloss hired Lowe for a number of family dresses, including debut dresses for Jacqueline and Lee in the late 1940s (Fig 27) and Nina Auchincloss in the early 1950s. Along with the Kennedy wedding party, Lowe also designed the gowns for
Nina’s wedding, including 14 bridesmaid dresses and the bride’s gown.3
Some young women wanted little to do with the lengthy process of fittings and design meetings, while others enjoyed the process. When a young lady preferred to remove herself from the process, Lowe worked directly with their contact. When Pickett
Huffines was preparing for her debut year, getting fitted for a dress and talking about the design in long meetings was of very little interest to her. Lowe took the order from the
Huffines family friend, Edith Head, the iconic fashion designer from Paramount Studios.
The gown was one of the most expensive Lowe sold that season, and was pictured in
Ebony. The one thousand dollar price suggests that the gown featured exceptionally detailed customized needlework. Unfortunately, the photograph of the gown (Fig 44) only gives hints and glimpses of the complex white on white embroidery work involved.
And what was the reason behind Edith Head’s involvement? Head was designing for Paramount during this period and Pickett’s father was a member of Paramount’s
64 Board of Directors.4 Head became close to Huffines’ mother, Eleanor, and according to
Pickett, “I remember that she told my mother that she wanted to do my debutant before she retired.”5 Eleanor Huffines died in 1959, and it is sweet to see that Head kept a promise to her friend. It is also curious to see that Edith Head ordered the gown through
Ann Lowe. Head had one of the best costume departments in Hollywood at her disposal, although the year of Pickett’s debut was also one of Head’s busiest years at Paramount.
Between 1965 and 1966, Head was the lead designer on at least eighteen films.6 With this amount of work in front of her, the debut gown for a family friend was probably not something that she could take the time to create herself, or even assign to a Paramount seamstress.7
It is not known if the design of the gown started with Head, if it was a collaboration between Head and Lowe or if Head just facilitated the process and ordered a dress from a respected designer she knew in the field, on behalf of a young woman who had very little interest in fashion. The Huffines gown was one of a handful featured by name in the Ebony article, so it is clear that Lowe was proud of it. Ebony mentioned not only its top price (the most expensive gown in the article) but that Huffines made a
“double debut in it at two prestigious assemblies”8
The experiences of Joan Dillon and Pickett Huffines demonstrate the weight of
Lowe’s professional reputation. Legends like Dior and Head were not only aware of New
York Society’s best-kept secret, but they showed admiration for her. Especially in the case of the Huffines debut gown, it can be argued that a designer with the talent and reputation of Edith Head would only seek assistance from other designers who she felt were at her own level.
65 In the case of the Ak-Sar-Ben Coronation gowns, Lowe worked directly with representatives from the Ball committee. Taken as a group, the thirty-three ballgowns of the 1961 Ak-Sar-Ben Coronation Ball are the largest known single commission of Ann
Lowe gowns discovered to date. Four styles were designed for the princesses (Figure 45), two styles were designed for the countesses (Figure 42 and Figure 46) and one gown was designed exclusively for the queen (Figure 43). The women’s ball committee reviewed
Lowe’s sketches and visited New York to view samples.9 The young ladies of the court had very little input into the gown designs although the Queen of the Ball, Connie
Cowdery O’Neil from Omaha, Nebraska, recalled that she was allowed to voice her opinion about one design change for the sake of modesty. “The original idea for the dress was scoop necked like everyone else,” she recalled, “but I never liked my clothes low so she put the added material on top.”10 A thank you letter from the chairman of the event noted that the young ladies were pleased with the final gowns. “Everyone was delighted with your creation. The Queen’s gown was exquisite and the young ladies who were
Princesses and Countesses were also very happy with their own gowns.”11
If a customer showed interest in dress design, and wanted a good deal of influence in the final result, Ann Lowe was also a wonderful choice. This was the case with Ann
Bellah Copeland, a young woman living in New York City. Copeland was a customer at
Lowe’s Lexington Avenue shop in 1964, and probably one of her first customers after she recovered from cataract surgery.
For Ann Copeland, in 1964, Lowe was recommended by friends as a quality designer to use for her June wedding. Wedding gowns were sought through individual designers or department stores during this period, and in Copeland’s circle of friends,
66 Lowe was “considered one of the great designers of wedding dresses and coming-out dresses.”12 Copeland’s family hired Eleanor Garnett, a famous Italian born designer, for her debut dress in 1957, and in comparing the experiences of working with each designer,
Copeland found Lowe to be much more receptive to her stylistic preferences.13 Their meetings took place in a simple space “on the second floor of a building on the south side of Lexington Avenue around 78th Street.” This was Lowe’s new (and very simple) showroom and workspace. Copeland and Lowe worked together to create the gown she wanted, “A very simple and very high-styled wedding dress with a court train coming down from the top of my shoulders.” Copeland recalled, “As I had been working in the fashion field I felt the days of the big skirted, fussy flowers, ruffles and embroidery were over. I was also bored by the idea of too much lace.” (Figure 47)14
Looking back at some of Lowe’s other custom gowns from the period, such as the dramatic beaded tulle gown worn by the Ak-Sar-Ben queen (Fig 43), or even the heavily constructed Kennedy wedding gown (Fig 1a), it may be surprising to think that a customer who felt that, “the days of the big skirted, fussy flowers, ruffles and embroidery were over” would feel comfortable approaching this designer in search of a simple silk wedding gown with simple lines and minimal decoration. When held against Lowe’s other work from this period, the Copeland gown (Fig 48) is nearly startling in its simplicity. Lowe had always designed with the client’s style at heart. Copeland was quite tall and her presence would have been lost in the big bouffant skirts of what Jackie
Kennedy called, “a tremendous dress, a typical Ann Lowe gown.”15 Instead of pushing her clients to accept the same busy silhouette, she was known for customizing the client experience. In Tampa, Lowe’s longtime experience with the same clients was a helpful
67 factor in designing to fit their personal preferences. Copeland, however, did not have an established relationship with Lowe. This gown would be their only opportunity to work together, and instead of relying on previous knowledge of Copeland’s style, Lowe worked to get Copeland to share her own thoughts about the dress during sketch and fit meetings. Copeland recalled that Lowe was “very frail, but still so gentle and talented” and the women worked well together.16 “We worked together on this. She loved my ideas and we worked as a team.”17 Copeland had experience as a fashion staff member on
Ladies’ Home Journal, covering fashion shows in Paris, and she was comfortable with couture work, which probably helped her to communicate her ideas to Lowe.18
By 1964, the years had slowed Lowe’s pace dramatically. She was no longer the twenty-year old designer who could design and complete a fancy dress in one day, the way she could during the height of her years in Tampa.19 Lowe was “surrounded by
‘helpers’ at all times.” Lowe was present at every meeting, although “she was always there with people hovering around her. She was almost blind at that point.” The amount of sewing that Lowe was able to complete on this gown was unclear, however the end results were perfect. “The dress was fabulous!” Copeland recalled.20
It is not surprising to hear that Lowe’s advancing age and health problems brought Copeland to worry at times that she would “never see the final product,” and when she asked Lowe if they could also plan the bridesmaid’s dresses, Copeland noticed that one of Lowe’s assistants, “gave me a nod, clearly indicating not to let her do them…she was simply not up to it by then.”21 Ten more dresses were needed for the wedding (for the maid of honor, bridesmaids and two flower girls) but they were designed by another design house to coordinate with Lowe’s dress. According to the New
68 York Times, “all the attendants were gowned in long ivory linen dresses made with empire waistlines.”22
The amount of revenue Lowe missed by having to pass on designing ten additional dresses was substantial, and a sign that even with this fresh start, things were beginning to fall out of place. It would be difficult to not compare this experience to the height of Lowe’s career when she could outfit an entire wedding party or Gasparilla court without a problem. Fortunately, Ann Copeland’s gown was finished on time and without incident. Ann Lowe’s shop was also able to provide the full service, door-to-door staff assistance on the day of the wedding that was expected of a designer of her league. In the same way that other designers helped the bride to prepare on their wedding day, Lowe’s staff went to Copeland’s home to help her dress. It was a rainy day and the staff assisted her while she entered the car, by holding umbrellas for her. This was an expected part of a couture wedding gown experience, and a service that Lowe provided herself in Tampa when she, “was present to straighten out the veils as the brides began their walk down the church aisle” during weddings throughout the 1920s.23 This stands as a testament to
Lowe’s character to see that she was still able to maintain her competitor’s standards of customer service during a period when she faced so many personal challenges.
The dress that Lowe designed for Copeland is surprising because it rejects all of the established hallmarks of an Ann Lowe Original. No complicated appliques or applied fabric flowers are used, and aside from the very early examples produced for the Lee family between 1916 and the late 1920s, this is the only Lowe gown reviewed for this thesis that does not have beading or complex embroidery. There are very few clues on the exterior to identify this gown as her work and it does not have a label. The slight scoop
69 neck and three-quarter length sleeves continue the gown’s modern line and the only ornament, a slim silk bow in a matching fabric that attached to the front waist with a snap, adds an elegant touch that complemented the gown’s dramatic court train. The
Bradford Bachrach wedding portrait (Figure 48) showcases the dramatic effect to its fullest. The court train’s drape over Copeland’s tall frame creates a simple silhouette with a beauty that could never be matched by covering the bride in heavy petticoats or embroidered orange blossoms and lace.
The Copeland wedding gown is a part of the permanent collection of the
Delaware Historical Society in Wilmington, Delaware. It will be a valuable modern example of Lowe’s work to study alongside the more traditional ball gowns in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that feature large skirts and portrait neckline bodices.
Design features of Ann Copeland’s wedding gown suggests that Lowe may have been successful in transitioning away from the complicated ball gowns that were falling out of style during the late 1960s. Lowe continued to design with a modern touch throughout the 1960s, and in 1967 her “fairy-tale princess” style was changing to fit a new generation of debutantes. The Copeland gown, and others during this period, including the gown shown in Vanity Fair in 1967 (Figure 49) refreshed her business with styles that were more relevant to young women in the era of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. “The girls want more fitting-in at the waist.” Lowe told the New
York Times in 1967 when reporter Virginia Lee Warren visited Lowe’s shop (located back on Madison Avenue around 55th Street) to ask about her newest looks. “Last year they wanted a shallow scoop or even a tank-top neckline. Now if it isn’t a low back, it’s
70 the portrait, deep off –the-shoulder one.”24 It is not clear if Lowe was aware of the scandalous nature of her new designs, her thoughts on the subject could be taken as somewhat naïve or purposefully tongue in cheek:
This year the dresses, at least those made by Mrs. Lowe, are different. The designer of Mrs. John F. Kennedy’s wedding dress has bared the debutantes’ backs almost to the waist. When a mother asked Mrs. Lowe why the fabric in back was almost nonexistent, the designer, who wears a black fedora while she works, said: “To save my beautiful dresses; I want to keep the hands of the boys from getting them so dirty when they dance.”25
That year, Lowe’s studio, with the help of her staff of five seamstresses made 85 dresses for the largest debut balls in the city.26 Lowe began working with a new partner, a designer named Florence Cowell.27 Lowe was no longer sketching or sewing at this time.
Finishing such a high number of custom gowns at the same time was an impressive accomplishment for a five person staff. Lowe mentioned that she was finally able to price her dresses appropriately. In 1957, during a period when she was not always comfortable with her pricing structure, Lowe charged “up to $500” for her gowns.28 By 1967 however, the gowns were priced between $200 and $995, with the average price for a debutante gown being between $395 and $495.”29 Gowns could even be purchased on a walk-in basis and a custom gown could be ordered in 1966 for as low as 150 dollars.
With a revised pricing structure, a strong and highly skilled staff and a new modern outlook on her dress designs, Lowe was in a position to build upon her success and continue to bring Ann Lowe’s gowns into a new period of growth and success. In the period between 1964 and 1968, Lowe gave three national magazine interviews, one television interview on the Mike Douglas Show, and a number of newspaper interviews.
One of her debutante gowns was featured in Town and Country (Figure 49) and she was
71 slowly pulling away from her position as “Society’s Best Kept Secret,” and into public view.
Lowe’s tone in March of 1965 in a letter to Rosemary Lee was upbeat. She acknowledged that she had experienced, “lots of good luck, but twice as much bad.” and also that she, “knew how to make money for others to spend because I had bad management” but she was hopeful for new opportunities. “On Monday,” she wrote, “I am attending a conference with fashion editors from Harper’s Bazaar, Town and Country and Vogue. If the deal goes well, I shall be in Tampa to see you all very soon.”30 The project Lowe references in the letter is not known, and unfortunately Lowe’s work did not appear in any of these magazines during 1965.
During the spring of 1966, there was increasing speculation that Lowe might be considered for the design of Luci Baines Johnson’s wedding gown, although without a publicist, Lowe’s original query about designing the gown ended up lost in the office of
Presidential Correspondence, “unfortunately” one article by Washington Post fashion columnist Maxine Cheshire explained, “Miss Lowe had been too modest and had not really identified herself.”31 Other fashion houses of Lowe’s caliber had public relations representatives to make these kinds of queries. The job eventually went to a large design house that did have all of the professional lines of communication in place, the Johnson family’s preferred designer, Priscilla of Boston.32
Lowe would not create any more high profile gowns during her career, but she was still selling a number of debutante gowns through high end department stores around the country along with the business from her Manhattan shop. She donated a hot pink gown with inserted lace detail to the Tampa Junior League in 1967 (Figure 51) in
72 response to a request from Nell Lee Greening, the daughter of Nell Lee. The Junior
League was still one of the leading society organizations in Tampa and the Lee family was active in work for the League. “I contacted her in August,” Nell Lee Greening told a staff writer for the Tampa Daily Times, “and Ann agreed to send one of her gowns here to help us publicize the Ball. It’s a copy of a gown that originally sold in St. Louis for
$750.00 and it’s truly a work of art.”33 The Lees celebrated Lowe’s success proudly.
Rosemary, Louise, Grace and Nell passed down stories about her to the following generations and carefully saved newspaper and magazine articles about her exciting career. “We were just delighted with all of the things she did,” Nell Lee Greening recalled in January 2012, “It made us feel so good for her. It was wonderful what she did because it was not easy at that time!”
When the details about the Junior League Gala gown were being discussed, Lowe mentioned how much she would like to finally see what a large Tampa ball was like.
Lowe had designed hundreds of dresses for Tampa dances, and each event was segregated so she had no way of seeing her gowns on the dance floor. Nell Lee Greening was excited to be able to make that happen. Lowe came to Tampa to visit the Lees and attend the Junior League Gala.34 The Lee family escorted Lowe to the event, and although a few attendees were angered by the presence of an African American at an historically white event, the Lee family felt that Lowe had every right to attend. Ann
Lowe was a celebrity in the eyes of the Lee family, and not just any celebrity, but one whom they had personally helped along the way. After fifty years of contributing her talents to the formal events of Tampa, Lowe was finally able to attend a Tampa ball as a guest of honor.35
73 By the time of the Junior League Gala, Lowe’s health was continuing to fade and her career was coming to an end. The quality of Lowe’s eyesight continued to decrease and Lowe entered full retirement by 1972. “Ann Lowe’s Originals” closed and Lowe moved to the home of Ruth Alexander in Long Island.36
She received a number of local honors in New York City during the 1970s. In
1976, She was to be honored with a luncheon and fashion show held in her honor by an
African American Fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha. This final show dedicated exclusively to
Ann Lowe’s work showcased a number of dresses Lowe created in the 1940s and 1950s.
The citation read at the event highlighted her accomplishments:
An American and international designer whose life has been filled with sagas of patience, sadness and happiness, she has dressed First Ladies of the nation…there is no resentment of the illnesses, tragedies and financial problems that have beset her…she opened her first salon with a borrowed $20,000 and soon her name became synonymous with elegance and beauty. She has provided clothing for the grand entrances of some of the most celebrated ladies of our land.”37
Lowe was unable to attend the event, but a number of her family members were in attendance and her granddaughter, an aspiring fashion designer named Audrey Hassell, accepted a plaque on Lowe’s behalf.
It seems very fitting that Lowe’s final interview was given to the Tampa Tribune for the benefit of the Tampa residents who had been such an important part of Lowe’s early career. Betty Phipps, the Tribune reporter met Lowe in her New York hospital room to discuss the Alpha Phi Alpha luncheon. Lowe was completely blind at this point, and when she was presented with the plaque from the banquet to honor her life achievements,
Phipps noted that, “she ran her fingers over the plaque, the heavy wood frame, the brass plate set on velvet, her fingers outlined the engraving, “There are still a thousand ideas
74 for dresses in my mind,” Lowe told the reporter, “dresses which I see in great detail.”38
(Figure 51)
75 CONCLUSION
Ann Lowe was a talented woman with a truly remarkable career. She worked during a period in American history when social and political conditions created an oppressive environment for African Americans. A number of African Americans had few resources, inadequate educational opportunities and very little chance of reaching the height of their chosen fields. In this climate, Lowe went from a childhood in a dilapidated rural Alabama schoolhouse at the turn of the twentieth century to selling thousand dollar ball gowns on Madison Avenue. She created dresses of a lifetime for women from the most financially prosperous families of the United States. She designed thousands of gowns during a career that spanned nearly seventy years, but in 2012 her work (with the exception of Jackie Kennedy’s wedding dress) and name are virtually unknown.
The public may have forgotten Ann Lowe because she was unable to leave the public much to remember her by. The exclusivity of her work was both the secret of her success and one of the main factors in its decline. Lowe’s career was never intended for the middle class. Unlike many of the other fashion designers of the 1960s, Lowe did not license her name or design lower price point items for the ready to wear market. A few of her designs were available for wholesale, they were presumably at prices outside of a middle class price point. The wholesale companies for whom she worked, Madeline
Couture and A.F. Chantilly, no longer exist.
Her gowns were one of the kind pieces designed for one time wear at exclusive events, and almost all of her clients were wealthy white members of American society’s upper class. One assistant explained that Lowe, “checked the Social Register to see who
76 (her customers) were before she would even start (working with them.)”1 This circle had little reason to help Lowe to achieve more public success. Some amount of public recognition was preferable, but if Lowe became too successful, how would she find time to continue to design their gowns? There were advantages in keeping Lowe in the position of “Society’s Best-Kept Secret.”2 This attitude is a significant change from the attitudes of Lowe’s customers in Tampa. When Lowe wrote that, “knowing all the Top
Society people in New York has not been like knowing the Lees and others in Tampa”3 she was alluding to a very obvious differences between these two periods in her career.
Customers in Tampa helped Lowe to build herself up. Customers in New York gave
Lowe their steady business and then gave cheerful interviews to the Saturday Evening
Post about how fortunate they were that Lowe was undercharging for her work. ‘“Miss
Lowe’s dresses are so expensive,” says one customer with a fortune of many millions,
“but she has always made special rates for me.”’4 These were two remarkably different attitudes.
In the 1980s and 1990s a shift began to take place in the study of Lowe’s career.
African American historians began to discover her and fashion historians hurried to spotlight her work. When Lowe died in 1981, her obituary was published in papers throughout the country. The head of the Black Fashion Museum, Lois Alexander took on a daunting task when she made public calls for donations of work by African American designers for her small museum in Harlem, New York City. A number of Lowe’s gowns from her New York years were donated and preserved through this heroic effort.
Thinking about the unknown fate of the dozens of dresses Lowe designed during ten years of Tampa’s Gasparilla, fashion historians owe Alexander and her daughter, Joyce
77 Bailey, their thanks. Without their care and foresight, these gowns would face the same fate of the many lost Gasparilla gowns created during the 1920s in Tampa.
Historians began to write about Lowe and other African American designers who disappeared from view, and although there was not a lot of information available at the time, the work of Lois Alexander, and her book Blacks in the History of Fashion and
Rosemary Reed Miller, and her book Threads of Time: Fabric of History: Profiles of
African American Dressmakers from 1850 to the Present opened doors and began a discussion about these talented men and women. It is hoped that the smaller museums around the country, like the Henry Plant Museum that do have earlier examples of
Lowe’s work are able to preserve them. The red silk and gold lamé Gasparilla gown from
1926 is one of the earliest intact and confirmed examples of Lowe’s formal work, and it would be a tragedy to eventually lose this gown because it was unable to be properly conserved.
Lowe was not necessarily concerned about being commemorated. Designing dresses brought her joy and the rest of it just didn’t seem to bother her. She didn’t talk about her work the way that some people do when they are interested in immortality. “I like for my dresses to be admired,” she told the Saturday Evening Post in 1964. “I like to hear about it—the oohs and ahs as they come into the ballroom. Like when someone tells me, ‘The Ann Lowe dresses were doing all of the dancing at the cotillion last night.
That’s what I like to hear.”5
Substantial opportunities for new scholarship about Lowe and many other designers will become available with the opening of the National Museum of African
American History in 2015. The Black Fashion Museum’s collection was donated to the
78 museum in 2007. The exact contents of the collection will not be known to researchers until they are fully catalogued by Smithsonian staff, hopefully by the date of the museum’s opening in 2015.
The collection is known to include some Ann Lowe dresses and sketches, which have been published previously in the Alabama Heritage 1999 article about Lowe, but it is not known if any of Lowe’s other papers are included in that group. It is hoped that the next researchers to study the designers in the Smithsonian’s collection in the future will approach the research of their subjects’ lives and work through a wide lens that views race as just one of many important factors to investigate.
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APPENDIX A
Organdy and Black Lace Afternoon Gown, Private Collection, Tampa, Florida
Dress, c. 1925 Organdy, Lace
To a modern eye, the generous use of black lace may seem like an unexpectedly heavy touch on what would otherwise be a dainty Afternoon Dress. The severe color contrast seems to weigh down the airy design, but the use of black lace insertion on light colored Afternoon Dresses may have been more prevalent than expected during this period. A 1912 article in Silk Journal explained that the contrast between black and white was common and “in such good taste and so extremely chic that from all authoritative sources it is learned that it will be lasting.” The black lace/white dress color combination was also shown in fashion publications of the period such as the Butterick’s Delineator magazine (Figure 15). It is possible that Lee requested a design that referenced these earlier styles that she felt suited her. Because of this, the dress may reflect the personal tastes of Josephine Lee more than the most popular dress styles of the period. A sash in a complimentary color may have been worn tied at the waist.1 The same dress made with ivory lace may have been more appropriate for a younger woman. Black lace may have been selected to tone down the somewhat youthful dress style to better compliment the age of its owner. The exact date of this dress is unknown, but if this dress belonged to
Josephine, she was born in 1866, and would have been in her early 50s at this time.2
Lightweight organdy would have been appropriate for the Tampa’s climate. The dress is missing the original undergarment, but is too sheer to have been worn alone.
80 Lingerie snaps are still present, placed at each shoulder to secure the straps of the undergarments.
The sleeve (Figure 14b) is divided into three sections: pleated top, inserted lace panel and pleated bottom. Each section is about 5.5" long (about 13 cm). The sleeve ends directly above the elbow and closes with one hook and eye.
The top portion of the sleeve is pleated. These pleats have been created through the use of three fine rows of gathers (Figure 14d). Horsehair is attached to the reverse side of the sleeve (Figure 14e) to enhance the puffed shape. The bottom of the sleeve is shaped with three rows of fine gathers (figure 14b) to create the pleats. All of the gathers are hand stitched. The pleats are graduated, starting at a narrow 6 mm at the front and back of the underarm. The section directly underneath the arm is not pleated. The lace attaches directly to that plain portion of the bodice. Evidence of a roll seam can be observed at the front and back of the underarm. A 2.5 cm (about 1”) piece of black fabric secures the two edges. Top stitching is used on this small section. The organdy sections of each sleeve have been hemmed from the underside at the lace edge. This may be because the border of the lace is covered by the organdy.
The bodice (Figure 14f) features a square neckline. Three rows of loose gathers create a series of bodice pleats from the square neckline to the waistline. The waistline is high, and was most likely designed to fall directly under the bust. The measurement from the top of the neckline to the waistline (measured from the center) is about 23 cm (about
9”). Plain seams are used at the waistline. A second row of hand stitching is visible at the edge of the seam allowance in some areas. These additional stitches may have been put in
81 place to prevent the fraying of the seam allowance, although Lowe did not use the technique consistently.
The back of the bodice (Figure 14g) closes with a set of 5 hooks and eyes and one snap. A button placket (figure 14h) with eleven covered buttons is attached over the hooks for decorative purposes. In most cases, organdy is too fine to accommodate buttonholes. The stress of 11 functional buttons would rip the cloth without the use of significant reinforcements. This kind of additional material would make the back of the dress unusually heavy.
The skirt (figure 14c) is roughly 122 cm (about 48") long from the waistline to the bottom hem. The skirt is sewn from 7 panels of organdy attached with plain seams. The panels are narrow at the waistline about 10 cm (about 4") wide and expand to roughly to a width of 152.5 - 165 cm (about 60 - 65"). The two back panels close with one eye-hook and one snap. Plain seams (with the seam allowance pressed flat) are used to attach the panels.
The front and back center of the lace insertion is covered with an additional panel with a width of about 12.5 cm (about 5"). The seam above the inserted panel ends at the center seam of the lace insertion. The bottom panel between the narrow center panels is roughly 152.5 cm (about 60") wide and the back panel is 165 cm (about 68").
The same type of lace used for the sleeves is used in the skirt, however the completed band of skirt insertion is wider because Lowe used the edge of the lace (a border that was designed by the lace manufacturer to be used to attach to the garment and hidden by the seam) as a decorative element. The lace bands are about 15.5 cm (about 6") wide. This finishing method may have been used to provide extra stability in an area of
82 additional stress. The lace on the arms would need to stand up to more pulling and strain than the lace panels on the skirt.
The zig-zag pattern (Fig 14c) is created with 16” long strips of lace sewn together at their edge. On the reverse side, black thread Lowe used to attach the lace to the organdy is visible. To complete the lace insertion, the lace was stitched in place on full panels of organdy. After the lace was attached, the organdy inside the lace zig-zag was cut away. Twenty-two panels of lace are used in the skirt and the edge of the cut organdy is unfinished. The skirt’s rolled hem is about 1/8” long.
Generations of the Lee family have enjoyed this gown since Josephine passed it to her daughter Louise. It was last worn at a vintage fashion show at the Tampa Yacht and
County Club in 2004.3 The dress is in very good condition, although it has not been conserved. The following condition issues are present:
• Discolored organdy • Loose horsehair in the sleeves • Discolored button placket • Stained and discolored lace on one front skirt panel: One panel of lace on the skirt and a section of organdy fabric is discolored, possibly from a spill that was not cleaned before the dress was stored or a leak during storage. • A black ink stain on the bottom right side of the skirt • Small rips in some of the seams • Small rips in the lace on the sleeves, and several lace panels of the skirt. • Several small rips in the organdy have been patched with a synthetic fabric.
The condition of this dress serves as an intriguing example of an important historical object at home with the family of its original owners. When a researcher takes a look at this dress, they see one of the earliest examples of Ann Lowe's work. To the Lee family, this is the dress of a beloved great-grandmother and a link to a dressmaker who was remembered warmly through family stories for years while the current generation of
Lees was growing up. One suggestion for preserving the overall condition of the garment
83 is to replace the synthetic organza patches used throughout the dress with a natural organdy patch. Natural fiber patches reduce the stress on the original material and should be used to repair natural fiber garments whenever possible.4
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NOTES Introduction
1. Although the bride’s dress was one of kind, an official McQueen reproduction of Pippa’s bridesmaid dress was produced for ready to wear sale in November 2011 for £1,195. A number of unauthorized interpretations of Kate Middleton’s gown were rushed to sale shortly after the wedding, but the McQueen design house did not reproduce the design for public sale. “Pippa Middleton’s Alexander mcQueen Bridesmaid’s dress now on sale,” http://www.graziadaily.co.uk/fashion/archive/2011/11/23/pippa-middleton-s- alexander-mcqueen-bridesmaid-s-dress---now-on-sale.htm and Booth Moore, “In Fashion, the Brand Plays On.” Los Angeles Times, May 8, 2011.
2 . “Alexander McQueen Reigns Supreme After Royal Duty,” Drapers, May 6, 2011.
3. The attendant gowns were described in detail as well “the gowns of the matron and maid of honor were embellished with cummerbunds of pink silk faille and also Tudor caps of matching faille. The gowns of the other bridal attendants had similar cummerbunds of red silk faille and they wore also matching Tudor caps.” “Notables Attend Senator’s Wedding,” New York Times, September 13, 1953.
4. Booth Moore, “In Fashion, the Brand Plays On.”
5. A number of online sources cite the book Threads of Time, by Rosemary Reed Miller for noting that the Washington Post was the only outlet to identify Lowe in its wedding coverage, however the Post coverage of the wedding during 1953 does not appear to name Lowe. Coverage by name in the post is also unlikely because Nina Hyde, the staff member who was credited with this 1953 coverage did not work at the Washington Post until 1972. A look at Threads of Time confirms that Miller did not present this claim, but unfortunately, many articles about Lowe have referenced this incorrect credit. This is an example of the misinformation available in most biographical writing about Lowe.
6. “26 Attendants to Take Part in Kennedy Ceremony Tomorrow,” Boston Globe, September 10, 1953.
7. Christopher Anderson, Jack and Jackie: Portrait of an American Marriage, (New York: William Morrow, 1996), 9.
8. The Kennedy wedding gown has appeared at the top of many “Best Celebrity Wedding Gown articles in American fashion magazines and television news programs. It
85 is also notable to see that Lowe was not credited in the article. The 2010 Marie Claire list is one of literally dozens of celebrity wedding articles that include Lowe’s gown. The majority of these articles do credit Lowe by name. http://www.marieclaire.co.uk/fashion/best/3114/9/celebrity-weddings.html, accessed January 10, 2012.
9. “New York Negro Designer Fashions Debutant Gowns, Calgary Herald, November 20, 1967.
10. The Smithsonian has one Lowe gown in the collection of the National Museum of American History. After acquiring the collection of the Black Fashion Museum in 2007, the Smithsonian Institution gained an unspecified number of Lowe’s dresses. More information will be available about this collection after the opening of the National Museum of African American History.
11. After John Kennedy’s assassination, a number of books entered the market detailing life with the Kennedy’s from the view of various employees. Mrs. Kennedy’s nanny, personal secretary and one of her other dressmakers, Mimi Rhea, all published biographies about their experience with the Kennedy family.
12. Thomas Congdon, Jr. “Ann Lowe: Society’s Best Kept Secret” Saturday Evening Post, December 12, 1964, 75.
13. According to a representative from the Columbia Broadcast System, all footage of this appearance has been lost. The program aired on December 31, 1964 in most markets (and possibly on other dates in other markets) and also featured Mia Farrow. CT Clip licensing Email to Author July 13, 2011.
14 . Anita L Polk, “Ann Lowe Designs ‘One of a Kind”, Call and Post, February 20, 1965.
15. The Christian Dior story comes from the Congdon article in the Saturday Evening Post, December 12, 1964, 75. Information about Edith Head comes from correspondence from a former Lowe client, Pickett Huffines, Email to Author, August 24, 2011.
16. Congdon, 76.
17. Ibid.
Chapter 1
1. Barbour County’s population in 1890: 13,454 white residents and 21,444 African American residents. Benjamin Franklin Riley, Alabama As it Is (Montgomery: Brown Printing Co., 1893) 190 -193.
86
2. Ann Lowe was known by several names: Annie Cone, Annie Cone West, Annie West and Ann Lowe. She chose to call herself Ann Lowe between 1928 and 1981 and I will refer to her as Ann Lowe.
3. Congdon, 75.
4. U.S. Department of the Interior, Thirteenth Census, 1910, Dothan Ward 3, Alabama, s.v. “Lee Cone,” Ancestry.com.1910 United State Census.
5. If Lowe's self reported 1898 birthdate is correct she would have been 11 years old on the date of the 1910 census. Her birth date was listed in that census as 1889. In a 1966 interview with the Oakland Tribune, Lowe stated that she left school at age 14 to get married. Vital records in the state of Alabama were not required until the late 1930s. Alabama birth certificates were not issued before 1908. Some counties kept birth ledgers. Barbour County (Lowe's birthplace) did not. http://www.vitalrec.com/al.html#State, accessed January 12, 2012.
6. The sisters lived and worked together until Sallie's death in 1967. Sallie’s death was announced in the New York Times. As Sallie Mathis of Saks Fifth Avenue, Sister of Ann Lowe,” “Deaths” New York Times, September 3, 1967.
7 . The presence of Tommie Mae Cole from Alabama on the 1930 Census listing of Lowe’s New York City household suggests Lowe maintained a relationship with her Alabama relatives. U.S. Department of the Interior, Fifteenth Census, 1930, Manhattan, New York s.v. “Tommie Mae Cole,” Ancestry.com.1930 United States Census.
8. It is not clear if Janie was the biological daughter of General Cole. General was Cole’s first name and did not refer to any military affiliation. Melissa Sones, “Fashioned Exclusively at Ann Lowe's Gowns,” American Legacy 4(1999): 32.
9. Sally Holabird. “Ask Her About Jackie’s Bridal Gown,” Oakland Tribune, August 7, 1966; Ann Smith, “Ann Lowe Couturier to the Rich and Famous,” Alabama Heritage 53 (1999):8.
10 . Congdon, 75.
11. “Inaugural Ball was a Brilliant Success,” Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, Al), January 17, 1911.
12. Anita Polk. “Anne (sic) Lowe…Designs One of a Kind.” Call and Post, February 20, 1965.
87
13. Wilma King. The Essence of Liberty: Free Black Women During the Slave Era. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 71.
14. Sepia: Fashion Designer for the Elite. August 1966, 33.
15. Lois K. Alexander, “Funeral Program Obituary,” February 1981.
16. Holabird, “Ask Her About Jackie’s Bridal Gown.”
17. Geri Major, “Dean of American Designers,” Ebony, December 1966, 138.
18. Ibid.
19. 78% of eligible white students were enrolled in the school system. State of Alabama Department of Education, Annual Report of the Department of Education of the State of Alabama for the Scholastic Year Ending September 30, 1911, 1911, 5.
20. Ibid, 6.
21. As a comparison, the average amount spent per students in the United States in 1918 was twenty-two cents for city schools and fifteen cents for rural schools. This amount includes ‘colored’ (and integrated) schools. State of Alabama Department of Education, A Statistical Study of Education in Alabama From 1890-1921, 1922, 52.
22. U.S. Bureau of Education. Bulletin, 1919, No 41. An Educational Study of Alabama, 1919, 182.
23. Some rural white schools in Alabama were also found to have unacceptable physical conditions, but they were an exception, and also one of the main focuses of the states efforts to improve and modernize the schools. This attempt at modernization did not appear to apply to African American schools.
24. Individual literacy was one of the questions on the Twelfth Census in 1900.
25. U.S. Department of the Interior, Twelfth Census, 1900, Clayton Precinct 7, Barbour County, Alabama, s.v. “General Cole,” Ancestry.com.
26. State of Alabama Department of Education, Literacy and Illiteracy in Alabama, 1914, 5.
27. U.S. Bureau of Education. An Educational Study of Alabama, 178-182.
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28. The 1914 death of Janie Lowe is confirmed by her gravestone, documented in Alabama Heritage magazine, “Jane Cole Lowe 1860- 1914 Mother of Ann Lowe, Fashion Designer”
29. Sepia, “Fashion Designer,” 33.
30. Holabird, “Ask Her About Jackie’s Bridal Gown”
31. Congdon, 75.
32. The Lee and Edwards Citrus Packing Company opened with Josephine's brother, Lamarcus Edwards as a partner in 1910 “Florida Citrus Hall of Fame- Lamarcus C. Edwards, St (1870-1948) – Inducted 1970- Welcome to the Citrus Hall of Fame,” http://floridacitrushalloffame.com/inductees/1970-1979/1970/lamarcus_edwards_sr (accessed September 25, 2011).
33 . Margaret Culbreth Hall, A lifetime white resident of Dothan believe that Lowe was probably not shopping in the department store when she was discovered, “there were only two department stores during that time—the most notable being named Bloombergs where people would go in, sit down and be shown different articles of clothing.” Hall’s family believes that Lowe “was most likely a seamstress or one of the employees who showed the shoppers items for sale.” It is not completely inconceivable to think that Lowe may have been shopping in the store but they believe that although Lowe would not “necessarily have been prevented from entering a department store as a shopper…she would not have been encouraged.” Elizabeth Hall interviewing Margaret Culbreth Hall , e-mail message to author April 1, 2012. 34. Joan Apthorp, Interview with author, August 18, 2011.
35. Holabird, “Ask Her About Jackie’s Bridal Gown.”
36. Congdon, 75.
37. Apthorp, Interview with author, September 2, 2011
38. Congdon, 75.
39. This story would be repeated by Lowe in Sepia, and other interviews, however in a 1966 interview for the Oakland Tribune, Lowe would tell the reporter that she was a widow with a child by the age of 14 and that this happened before the death of her mother. Janey died in 1914. This would have been at least 2 years before this incident in the Dothan store. An Alabama death certificate dated April 7, 1920 shows that Lee cone, a 45 year old tailor, died in Dothan, Alabama on April 7, 1920. Holabird, “Ask Her About Jackie’s Bridal Gown.”
89
40. Lowe is still vibrantly remembered by relatives of Lowe’s early clients throughout the Old Tampa community as Annie Cone.
41. Hillsborough County Planning & Growth Management, Hillsborough County Historic Resources Survey Report Excerpt: Thonotasassa: Tampa, 1998, 3.
42. It is possible (but cannot be confirmed) that the household staff was housed in a separate building apart from the main house. Apthorp, Interview with author, August 18, 2011.
43. Ibid.
44 . A letter written from Lowe to Rosemary Lee Johnston spoke warmly about Lowe’s experience in Tampa. This suggests that the arrangements regarding her work were acceptable to Lowe. Ann Lowe to Rosemary Lee Johnston, March 1965.
45. It can be assumed that each customer outside of the Lee’s immediate family brought material to Lowe for their gowns. This will be described later from accounts of her dressmaking shop from the 1920s.
46. Lee family records (a note written by a family member in the early 1980s) suggest that Lowe’s first garment in Tampa was actually a wedding gown for a member of the Lee’s extended family, Miriam. Miriam wore the wedding gown again when she served as a matron of honor at the twins’ wedding. Her own wedding was three months earlier. Lowe never mentioned this first commission, and details of Miriam’s dress cannot be confirmed. This may be more family lore than a completely accurate account.
47. Ibid.
48. Tampa Daily Times, “Beautiful Wedding” January 1, 1917.
49. Ibid.
50. Lowe made a number of doll dresses throughout her career, most notably, a set of copies of gowns worn by United States First Ladies in a commission for the Evyan Perfume Company. These dolls toured department stores and malls during the 1960s, and eventually included first lady’s up to Lady Bird Johnson in copies of gown sewn by Lowe and her staff. Several sets were created, and one is on permanent (private) display at the Congressional Club in Washington, DC. Tampa Morning Tribune, “They Are Sisters” December 14, 1957. Washington Post, “A $1500 doll dress,” June 10, 1965.
51. Elinor Boushall, Interview with Author, Jan 19, 2012.
52. Joan Apthorp, Interview with Author, August 18, 2011.
90
53. This school was identified in interviews and in Ann Lowe's obituary as the S.T. Taylor School of Sartorial Arts, an established school in Manhattan. S.T. Taylor offered classes in patternmaking, tailoring and dressmaking, however the published fees from a 1915- 1916 school advertisement are significantly lower than the $1500 dollar tuition Lowe claimed to have paid in 1917 when interviewed by the Saturday Evening Post in 1964. Another reason to question if she attended the S.T. Taylor school is that the school advertised in The Crisis, the monthly magazine of the NAACP. It can be assumed that a school that advertised in an African American publication in January of 1917 would not have been surprised by the arrival of an African American student that April. It is possible that she attended another school, but S.T. Taylor was incorrectly credited at some point, and became the Lowe family’s account.
54. Congdon, 76.
55. Apthorp, Interview with author, August 18, 2011.
56. The Saturday Evening Post has the most complete account of this early New York trip, but a number of details about this time are not known. The Lee family assumes that Lowe took her son with her to New York City, although Lowe never mentioned arrangements for Arthur during this time. It is probable that the Lee family would have a number of amusing stories about caring for Arthur in Lowe’s absence if she’d left him behind, and no stories like this have ever been told. It is most likely that Lowe took Arthur with her and arranged for his care during the day. Money would have been available from Lowe’s own savings, or perhaps with help from the Lee family to do this. Lowe never mentioned the details of her living arrangements during this period. It is possible that future research of Lee family correspondence could answer some of these questions at a later date. Congdon, 76.
57. New York City was not completely free of racial segregation in 1917. A statute that barred public accommodations segregation in New York City was passed in 1913, therefore Lowe was able to live with much more freedom in New York City than she could in Southern states. More information about the condition of Jim Crow laws in New York city (and along the East Coast) is available in the A.K. Sandoval-Strausz article, “Travelers, Strangers, and Jim Crow: Law, Public Accomodations, and Civil Rights in America,” Law and History Review, Spring 2005 Vol 23, No 1. 53-94.
58. Sepia, 33.
59. Holabird, “Ask Her About Jackie’s Bridal Gown.”
60. Ibid.
61. Emphasis original, Congdon, Jr., “Ann Lowe,” 76.
91
62. This was mentioned in only one interview. Holabird, “Ask Her About Jackie’s Bridal Gown.”
63. Sepia, 33.
64. Congdon, 76.
65. Institute of Women’s Professional Relations, Proceedings of the American Fashion Design Conference April 23 and 24, 1941, 1.
66. Alexandra Frye. “Fairy Princess Gowns Created by Tampa Designer for Queens in Gasparilla’s Golden Era.” Tampa Morning Tribune, February 7, 1965.
67. U.S. Department of the Interior, Twelfth Census, 1920, Tampa City, Hillsboro(sic) County, Florida, s.v. “Caleb West,” Ancestry.com.
68. The Social Mirror appears to be a Tampa published area newspaper or magazine. It is possible, however, that it was a regular column in a larger Tampa publication. Social Mirror, “Will Go to New York,” November 1927.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid.
71. Frye, “Fairy Princess Gowns.”
72 The Hillsborough Public Library oral history project records interviews with African American residents of Hillsborough County. Dorothy Reeder, the daughter of Martha Ravannah, recorded her interview and it is available in audio and pdf versions. http://www.thpl.org/thpl/history/memories/slice/Reeder.pdf This quote is on page 13 of the transcript.
73. Frye, “Fairy Princess Gowns.”
74. Frye, “Fairy Princess Gowns.”
75 . Congdon, 76.
76. Advertisement, Tampa Morning Tribune, October 10, 1928.
77. The name 'Cone' is spelled as 'Cohen' in all existing scholarship, Lowe's 1981 family written obituary. Census records in 1910, 1920 and 1930, Lee Cone's Alabama 1920 death record and Sheffield's ad each spell the name as 'Cone'.
92
78. Frye, “Fairy Princess Gowns.”
79. It should be noted that Lowe did create a number of dress designs for the wholesale market later in her career for Madeline Couture and A.F. Chantilly. Wholesale gowns were reproduced, but Lowe’s couture work was original. Betty Phipps. “Ann Cone Lowe: A Tampa Legacy is Honored in New York,” Tampa Tribune, August 7, 1976.
80. It is extremely interesting to note that clients came to Lowe’s shop on a regular basis. Jefferson street was on a streetcar line at the time, and accessible, but it is interesting to see that white residents of Tampa were comfortable to travel through the African American neighborhoods. Academic texts about the African American communities (written during the 1920s by white authors) suggest that the area was one to avoid. Frye, “Fairy Princess Gowns.”
81 . Elinor Boushall, Interview with Author, January 19, 2012.
82. “Reigning Queen of Gasparilla Becomes Bride,” Tampa Sunday Tribune, April 25, 1926.
83. Ibid.
84. Under Cohen or the alternate spellings, “Coan” or “Cone”
85. Until 1925, African Americans were noted with an asterisk by their names and businesses in the Polk City Directory. The practice appears to have ended in 1926, although I only reviewed the editions that were relevant to this thesis, and did not review any Polk Directories earlier than 1920 or later than 1929.
86. Husbands and wives regularly listed their professions in the residential listing section, and although other wives in Tampa chose to list their professions in this way, i.e. laundress, seamstress, Lowe did not.
87. Nancy A. Hewitt, Southern Discomfort, 146.
88. African Americans were identified with an asterisk next to their name during these years in the Tampa City Directory. The asterisks were removed in the 1925 edition, making it difficult to determine the race of each listed person.
89. Lowe to Rosemary Lee, March 1965.
90. Betty Phipps, “Ann Cone Lowe: A Tampa Legacy is Honored in New York,” Tampa Tribune, August 7, 1976.
91. Gasparilla has its own rich history and traditions, which are completely unrelated to Mardis Gras. Gasparilla was a segregated event and has had an interesting
93 and troubled racial history into the 1990s, when attention from a planned collaboration with the Super Bowl shed light on the fact that the Krewes involved in Gasparilla had no minority members, and that the event was, in effect, still a segregated event. Gasparilla has been considered by Tampa’s African American and Cuban communities as “a symbol of racial divide” and a troubling reminder of a difficult racial climate. Minority members began to join the Gasparilla festivities beginning in 1992. It is especially interesting to read the memories and accounts of Gasparilla from white and African American residents. One 59 year old resident of Tampa, and African American man, stated that he was always troubled by Gasparilla growing up and hadn’t been to the parade in 50 years. “A lot of black people in my age group won’t go near that parade because of what that Krewe has represented.” Kathryn Wexler. “New Krewes, old Questions.” St. Petersburg Times, February 1, 2002.
92. Frye, “Fairy Princess Gowns.”
93. Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 24.
94. “Lovely Evening Gowns Worn,” Tampa Morning Tribune, February 6, 1924.
95. Frye, “Fairy Princess Gowns.”
96. “Gasparilla Queen Becomes Bride,” Tampa Sunday Tribune, April 25, 1926.
97. Carson, Interview with author, September 10, 2011. Information about the Krewe headquarters fire was found in “Gasparilla So it was Then,” Tampa Tribune, February 7, 1965.
98. Frye, “Fairy Princess Gowns.”
99. Ibid.
100 Ibid.
101. Melissa Sones, “Fashioned Exclusively,” 34.
102. Frye, “Fairy Princess Gowns.”
103. Keller was listed in the Society Mirror article as one of Lowe’s wedding clients.
104. Frye, “Fairy Princess Gowns.”
105 . Ibid.
94
106. Ibid.
107. $20,000 in 1928 would be equivalent to $212,941.18 in January 2012. Calculated from the Consumer Price Index, from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://www.1soft.com/todaysdollars.htm accessed January 9, 2012.
108. Information from the Polk’s City Directory and the 1920 Census.
109. Jo Apthorp, interview with author, September 10, 1911.
110. Sepia, 34.
111. Phipps, “Ann Cone Lowe,” Tampa Tribune, August 7, 1976
112. Elizabeth Hawes, Fashion is Spinach (New York: Random House, 1938), 124.
113. Nell Lee Greening, Interview with Author, January 18, 2011.
114. “Will Go to New York,” Social Mirror.
115. Ibid.
Chapter 2
1. “Will Go to New York,” Social Mirror.
2. Congdon, 76.
3. “Will Go to New York,” Social Mirror.
4. Congdon, 76.
5. Ibid.
6. Elinor Boushall and Jo Apthorp, Interview with author January 19, 2012
7. The Gasparilla celebration continued with the addition of an unofficial Krewe, a band of pirates who could no longer afford their $50.00 dues. They tagged along to a number of the Gasparilla events on an unofficial basis. Dr. William Carson, Interview with author. September 10, 2011.
8. “Will Go to New York,” Social Mirror.
9. Sepia, 34.
95
10. Elizabeth Hawes, Fashion is Spinach, (New York: Random House, 1938) 203-205. Hawes was a dressmaker with years of experience in Parisian houses before beginning her own house in New York in 1928, a few blocks away from Lowe’s workshop.
11. Congdon, 76.
12. Ibid.
13 . In previous scholarship, Chez Sonia and Sonia Rosenberg are often confused. There were two designers with the first name of Sonia: Sonia Levienne, the owner of Chez Sonia, and Sonia Rosenberg, the owner of Sonia Gowns, Inc. Sonia Gowns, Inc is the company hired to create Olivia de Havilland’s 1947 Academy Awards Gown.
14. Information was taken from the 1930 United States Census. It is not clear if Caleb West moved to New York with the family. He appears in the 1930 Census as a Bellman living with Lowe on Manhattan Avenue, but Lowe told a reporter for the Oakland Tribune that he was supposed to follow her to New York, but never came. He would file for divorce in 1941 from Connecticut, however. This suggests that he lived in New York at some point after 1928. Fifteenth United States Census, 1930.
15. Frye, “Fairy Princess Gowns.” The 1930 census identifies these young women as Ruth Williams and Tommie May Cole.
16. “Polly” Bush was only mentioned by name in one article, but she was most likely Pauline Bush the daughter of Eliott T. Bush, a new York Physician. She married in 1937, and was listed in later society announcements as Mrs. Fred E. Potter, Jr. This suggests that Lowe’s society connections began before 1936, when Pauline Bush was still known socially by her maiden name. The family has no significant connection to the family of Prescott Bush. “Society,” Vogue. April 15, 1936. Congdon, 76. Interview with author, Bush.
17. Congdon 75.
18. Nan Robertson. “A Debutante Assembles Herself With Care,” New York Times, October 30, 1957
19. Congdon, 75.
20. Synthetic fabrics were an alternative to silk, which had become scarce as a result of World War II. “Artificial Silk” as it was called throughout the 1940s was an exciting new material, and the completed gown would have been considered to be a fine example of a couture gown.
96
21. See Frye, “Fairy Princess Gowns.” for additional information about Lowe’s personalized working style.
22. “Tanner is Wed in Chapel,” New York Times, November 29, 1941.
23. Lois K Alexander, Blacks in the History of Fashion, 113.
24. “Tanner is Wed,” New York Times
25. Frye, “Fairy Princess Gowns.”
26. West is listed as the head of the household in the 1930 West family census, taken in New York City. His occupation in New York was a hotel bellman. In a 1966 interview given by Lowe, she claimed that while West was supposed to join her in New York, he never came. Divorce papers were filed in Hartford, Connecticut in 1941, suggesting that West was in the vicinity of New York City during this period. Census and Sally Holabird, Divorce listing in the Hartford Courant.
27. Gerri Major, “Dean of American Designers.” Ebony. December 1966, 139.
28. Holabird, “Ask Her About Jackie’s.”
29. Congdon, 76.
30. Joan Dillon is now living in France and known as the Duchess du Mouchy. Lowe was the family dressmaker (picked by her mother) throughout the late 40s and early 50s. Lowe did not design Dillon’s 1953 wedding gown. e-mail message to author, November 7, 2011.
31. Lowe would later design a debut gown for Nina Auchincloss (Jacqueline and Lee’s step sister) featured in Vogue, along with the wedding and attendant gowns for Jacqueline and Nina.
32. Sharp eyed viewers of the cable channel Turner Classic Movies may be able to catch The Snake Pit promotional film and newsreel footage of de Havilland in her Academy Awards gown.
33. I was unable to find the original appearance of this quote in Vogue. I have used it here because the source has been extremely reliable, but it is hoped that I will find the original quote in Vogue. Congdon, 76.
34. Vogue, August 1955.
35. Lynn Sands, “High Times,” Newsday, May 14, 1951, 42.
97
36. Ruth Williams Alexander was considered by Lowe to be an informal adopted daughter. She worked with Lowe during Lowe’s entire New York career and took care of her (at her home) during the final years of Lowe’s life. Rosemary Reed Miller’s The Threads of Time and Ann Lowe’s official obituary provide information about their mother-daughter relationship.
37. Advertisement, New York Times, October 17, 1950.
38. Lynn Sands, High Times. Newsday, May 14, 1951, 42.
39. Elizabeth Hawes. Fashion is Spinach, (New York: Random House, 1938.) 134-146.
40. Congdon, 76.
41. Holabird, “Ask Her About Jackie’s.”
42. Major, “Dean of American Designers.”
43. A publication from the New York Department of Commerce explored the question of female business owners along Madison Avenue in Women’s Way with a Shop, 1954.
44. Lowe did make dresses for family members and African-American friends from time to time, but her business served an all white clientele with very few exceptions. This is discussed further in an article by Melissa Sones, “Fashioned Exclusively at Ann Lowe’s gowns”
45. Lowe’s column was mentioned in the Congdon article. She had an agreement during the early 1950s to attend the Paris collections and write articles for the New York Age. It is unclear how long she continued to write for the Age, although the trips to Paris gave her the opportunity to form friendships with French fashion designers, including Christian Dior. Congdon, 76.
46. Gerri Major, “Dean of American Designers.”139.
47. Ann Smith’s Alabama Heritage article discusses the work Lowe did for employees and Family members. Rosemary Reed Miller, Threads of Time was the first Lowe scholar to interview Elizabeth Mance de Jonge. Washington Post newspaper articles covered the news of the dress in 1968, as the first ‘Negro client of a Negro designer.’
48. Betty Phipps, “Ann Cone Lowe.”
98
49. Lowe was one of the designers listed in the roster for Fashion Fair Fashion Rebellion ’67. Advertisement Jet, September 21, 1967, 40.
50. These shops included “Henri Bendel in New York, Neiman Marcus in Dallas, I. Magnin in San Francisco, Lillian Montaldo’s” and also Saks Fifth Avenue. Major, “Dean of American Designers,” 138.
51. Vanity Fair, August 1967.
52. Lowe was charging as much as five hundred dollars per gown during this period. Nan Robertson, “A Debutante Assembles Herself”
53. Lowe’s shop mentioned their wholesale work in their classified help wanted advertisements posted in the New York Times in October 1957.
54. Post is identified as a Lowe client in articles in the Saturday Evening Post and Ebony. The story related in these articles, of Post introducing Lowe to some friends at a fashion show in Paris while Lowe was writing for the African American Paper the New York Age suggest that she was a client in the early 1950s.
55. This story was recounted in a few interviews Lowe gave during the late 1960s, including Ebony. This confirms that Mrs. Post was a client during the early 1950s, (It is most likely that Lowe’s travels for the New York Age ended before the middle of the decade.). The article does not mention specific gowns Lowe created for Mrs. Post. Major, 142.
56. Ibid.
57. The attribution of this gown to Ann Lowe was determined by Howard Kurtz, the textile curator at Hillwood, during the review of a small number of Mrs. Post’s gowns. Documentation related to this gown may exist in the University of Michigan’s collection of Mrs. Post’s papers, although further research would be needed to confirm this.
58. The sittings for this portrait began in late 1952. Curatorial file, 51.156. Hillwood Estate, Museum and Garden.
59. Correspondence from the curatorial file of the Chandor painting between Mrs. Post and Chandor’s agency, Portraits, Inc, reveals that Mrs.Post’s daughter attempted to schedule this portrait in 1951, but Chandor’s previous commitments pushed sittings for Mrs. Post back to the Fall of 1952. The typical chandor portrait required six to ten sittings. If Post’s sitting began in the fall, Chandor’s January 14, 1953 death suggests that this portrait was executed quickly, and possibly on an unexpected time. Curatorial
99
File, letters from Joseph Davies (Mrs. Post) to Mrs. James F. Shaw. Hillwood Estate, Museum and Garden. Ibid.
60. Chandor died in January 1953, leaving this portrait unfinished. The Post family accepted the portrait in its incomplete condition in honor of the artist (an established portrait artist who had also painted Queen Elizabeth II). Mrs. Post’s hands and jewelry are unfinished. The portrait currently hangs in Mrs. Post’s bedroom at Hillwood. Curatorial file of Portrait of Marjorie Merriweather Post (51.156).
61. Congdon, 76.
62. Curatorial file, Hillwood.
63 . Howard Kurtz, Interview with author. September 16, 2011.
64. Ibid.
65. Holabird, “Ask Jackie”
66. This white lace edging can be seen on the 1964 Copeland gown (Figure X). Holabird, “Ask Jackie.”
67 . Patricia Silence, E-mail to author, September 23, 2011.
68 . These letters are a part of the curatorial file of Chandor’s portrait of Mrs. Post at Hillwood.
69. I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to review scanned copies of Mrs. Post’s photo albums and scrapbooks which were kept by the family from the 1920s through the late 1960s in an unrelated research project during my Spring 2011 curatorial internship at Hillwood. Further study would be needed to confirm that photographs of Post in this dress do not exist, but I did not find any evidence to show that she had ever been photographed at an event in this gown.
70. Frye, “Fairy Princess Gowns.”
71. Congdon, 75.
72. Ibid.
73 . Silence, e-mail to author, September 23, 2011.
74. Conservation photographs of the Kennedy gown (taken during the 1997 conservation by the American Textile Museum in Lowell, Massachusetts) show that the
100 gown was heavily lined. Unpublished photographs, courtesy of American Textile Museum, Lowell, Ma.
75 . Interview with Howard Kurtz, April 20, 2012.
76 . Ibid.
77. Mini Rhea. I was Jacqueline Kennedy’s Dressmaker. (New York: Fleet Publishing Corporation, 1962) 25 -28.
78. Ibid, 39.
79. Ibid, 185-186.
80 This is discussed in many biographies about Jacqueline Kennedy. It is covered in great detail in Jan Pottker, Janet and Jackie: The Story of a Mother and Her Daughter, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001) 135-136.
81. Congdon, 76.
82. Information about this dress is available on the artists website. http://www.isabelledeborchgrave.com/en_creations.php?nav_link=01&nav2_link=06&cl assement=01
Chapter 3
1. In New York Times newspaper articles about debutante fashion, Lowe mentioned the number of gowns she was making for each ball.
2. Congdon, 76.
3 Ibid.
4. Very little historical information has been recorded about the Adam Room. The exact date of the department’s opening can not be determined and while some secondary source articles about Lowe incorrectly state that the Adam Room opened specifically to accommodate her work, the Adam Room was already an established department, and therefore, a competitor of Ann Lowe’s Gowns in the late 1950s. The Adam Room was discussed in a 1958 New York Times article, “Clothing Needs of the Debutantes Only as Extensive as Invitations” New York Times, December 11, 1958.
5. This advertisement was reprinted in the journal Alabama Heritage. Similar advertisements have not been located, and it appears that this may have been used in mailings to established Saks customers instead of printed in newspapers or magazines. The small scale of this advertising campaign does not take away from its pioneer status,
101 however. This may be the earliest example of an important American department store advertising the work of an African American designer in this way. Ann Smith, “Couturier to the Rich and Famous.” Alabama Heritage, Summer 1999, 12.
6. Congdon, 76. Emphasis added.
7 . An Ann Lowe gown in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute (Accession #1979.260.2) has a Saks Fifth Avenue label. 8. The given date of the gown (Accession # 1979.260.2) may be problematic however. The Costume Institute states a date between 1962 and 1964. For this dress to be an Ann Lowe gown, it would have to be created in 1962. According to the Saturday Evening Post interview, Lowe left Saks early in 1962 and reopened another shop, which was described in Melissa Sones’ article as “dingier quarters on nearby 53rd street.” That location was forced to close in September 1962. Her right eye was removed shortly afterward. Congdon, 76 Sones, “Fashioned Exclusively at Ann Lowe’s Gowns.” American Legacy.
9. Sones, “Fashioned Exclusively,” 38.
10. Ibid.
11. The articles in Alabama Heritage and American Legacy list several employees during the Saks period. The American Legacy article interviews Koval and Provenzano (both deceased) and it is helpful to hear their experiences first hand.
12. Prices for evening gowns designed in 1961 by Sophie Gimbel and sold in the evening wear department of the flagship store ranged from $545 to “$2900 for an elaborately embroidered evening dress” It would be reasonable to assume that Ann Lowe’s gowns were priced at similar price points. Sophie Gimbel originals are discussed in further detail in Pauline Arnold and Percival White, Clothes and Cloth: America’s Apparel Business, (New York: Holiday House, 1961.) 149.
13. It is interesting to note that Ann Lowe had enough name recognition to be included in a nationally syndicated gossip column in 1960. This may suggest that small amounts of press coverage about her work for Jacqueline Kennedy came about from time to time as the Kennedy family was gaining political prominence. Coverage about Lowe was minimal however, as indicated by the mistaken reference to Lowe as “a young but nationally known Negro.” She was in her 60s during this time with a career that had already spanned 40 years. Lee Mortimer, “New York Confidential,” Burlington Daily Times, December 14, 1960.
14. Jacqueline Kennedy kept in touch with Lowe and it was rumored that she was responsible for paying Lowe’s federal tax debt in 1962. Sones, “Fashioned Exclusively.”
102
15. “Mrs. Kennedy Picks Inaugural Gown,” Chicago Tribune, December 13, 1961. 16. “AK Coronation Ball Adds Ballet, Chorus,” Omaha Evening World-Herald. October 21, 1961.
17. Marilyn Russum, “Attendants in Cotillion-Like Gowns,” Omaha Evening World-Herald. October 21, 1961.
18 . Letter to Ann Lowe from Robert H. Storz, November 6, 1961.
19. The Ak-Sar-Ben committee spent large amounts of money on the ball each year. No expense was spared. There were gifts for all of the participants, each of the princesses and countesses attendant “14 –carat gold charms, each centered with a single diamond and engraved “Ak-Sar-Ben, 1961” and a florist in Chicago was hired to force Pink Lilies to bloom in time for the October ceremony.” It can be assumed that the budget for the dresses was quite generous. Omaha Evening World Herald, October 21, 1961.
20. This job was probably commissioned through Saks directly, although it is possible that it was a private commission for Lowe. She did have a clause in her contract that allowed her to keep her private clients. It is highly unlikely that Saks would allow a job of this size to become a private order.
21. Ibid.
22. Russum, “Attendants in Cotillion.”
23. Ibid.
24. This is probably the same material as the “French nylon tulle” used in the attendant gowns. Ibid.
25. Connie Cowdery O’Neil, e-mail message to author, November 12, 2011.
26. The silver beads had some amount of actual silver content in them. The Countess gowns at the Durham museum show evidence of silver tarnish on the silver beaded elements. Using beads with silver content in them was also one detail that probably led to higher than anticipated material costs for Lowe.
27. Bankruptcy docket, United States District Court, New York 63 B 105.
28. Congdon 76
29. Sones, 39.
103
30. Congdon, 75.
31. Congdon, 76.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
Chapter 4
1. This story also helps to date Lowe’s Paris travel for the New York Age to the early 1950s and probably no later than 1952. The New York Age was a weekly paper. It is available at the Library of Congress through microfilm, but it is not indexed. This makes it very difficult to find Lowe’s columns. Major, “Dean of American Designers.” 142.
2. Email to Author, November 7, 2011.
3. Congdon, 76.
4.Tishi Wilkerson and Marcia Borrie. Hollywood Reporter: The Golden Years (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc.,) 339.
5. Pickett Huffines e-mail to author, August 24, 2011
6. List of Head’s work is available at the Internet Movie Database: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0372128/
7. Pickett Huffines e-mail message to author, August 24, 2011.
8. Major, “Dean of American Designers,” 140.
9. “Ak Coronation Ball Adds Ballet, Chorus,” Omaha Evening-World Herald, October 21, 1961.
10. Connie Cowdery O’Neil e-mail message to author, November 12, 2011.
11. Letter to Ann Lowe from Robert Storz, November 6, 1961. This letter also mentions the presentation of a plaque “designating you as the official couturiere for the 1961 Ak-Sar-Ben Coronation and Ball.” This plaque has been referenced in existing scholarship about Lowe. She listed it in her own entry of Who’s Who in American
104
Women, 1968 as a “Couturier of the Year Plaque of 1961” previous researchers have incorrectly identified as a “couturier of the year plaque” given by an unidentified New York fashion group. Lowe may have created the confusion when she listed the plaque as a “Couturier of the Year Plaque” in two directories: the National Social Register and the Who’s Who of American Women in 1969. Reference librarians at the Fashion Institute of Technology believe that a “Couturier of the year” plaque was not awarded by any group in New York City. The Ak-Sar Ben plaque is almost certainly the one that was being referenced.
12. Ann Copeland letter to author, August 17, 2011.
13. Ann Copeland interview with author, November 2, 2011.
14. Ann Copeland letter to author, August 17, 2011.
15. Congdon, 76.
16. Ann Copeland letter to author, August 17, 2011.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19. Frye “Fairy Princess.”
20. Ann Copeland letters, e-mail messages and interview with author were used in this paragraph.
21 Ann Copeland, Letter to Author.
22. “Ann Power Bellah Becomes a Bride,” New York Times, June 7, 1964.
23. “Will Go to New York,” Social Mirror.
24. Virginia Lee Warren. “For Debutantes: Bare Backs,” New York Times, November 17, 1967.
25. Ibid.
26. Florence Cowell is identified in Sepia, 35.
27. Cowell is only mentioned as Lowe’s partner in the Sepia magazine article, Fashion Designer for the Elite. There is a Florence Cowell who was a dress designer and a boutique owner in Selinsgrove Pennsylvania during the mid 1950s. She was also listed in the New York Times listing “Arrival of Buyers” shopping for Florence Cowell and CO
105 in the summer of 1950. Two of the Lowe gowns in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum (1980.433.3 and 1980.433.4) were donated by Florence J. Cowell in 1980. No other information appears to be available about Ms. Cowell, although it appears probable that these references to Florence Cowell involve the same person.
28. Nan Robertson, “A Debutante Assembles Herself with Care,” New York Times, October 30, 1957.
29. An average of $400 for 85 gowns, would bring $34,000 to Lowe’s shop during the fall of 1967. This would be equivalent to $233,217.26 in 2012. This suggests that Lowe was finally beginning to make profitable decisions. The American Beauty Ballgown which is now in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution was one of the 85 gowns referenced in this article. It was worn by Barbara Baldwin. Interestingly, the flower applique was also used on the 1928 Gasparilla Queen gown. That is the first photographed example of Lowe’s fabric flower technique (Figure 23) http://www.dollartimes.com/calculators/inflation.htm. Warren, “For Debutantes: Bare Backs.”
30. Ann Lowe to Rosemary Lee Johnston, March 1965.
31. Maxine Cheshire. “Wedding Gown Offer Given by Top Designer,” The Calgary Herald, March 14, 1966.
32. Maxine Cheshire, Very Interesting People, Washington Post, May 8, 1966.
33. Tampa Daily Times, Undated clipping. 1967
34. The Gala included a fashion show by Hollywood designer, Helen Rose. Interestingly, Rose designed Grace Kelly’s iconic wedding gown.
35. Elinor Boushall, interview with author, January 19, 2012 Also e-mail message to author, September 10, 2011.
36. Phipps. “Ann Cone Lowe.”
37. Ibid.
38.Ibid.
Conclusion
1. Melissa Sones, Fashioned Exclusively at Ann Lowe’s Gowns, American Legacy, 1999.
2. Congdon, 76.
106
3. Ann Lowe to Rosemary Johnston, March 1965.
4. Congdon, 75.
5. Congdon, 76.
Appendix A
1. Noelie De La Sablere,”Paris Style Influences Strong for Silk,” Silk Journal, July 1912, 37.
2. The exact date of this dress is unknown. The family believes that it was created in the early 1920s for Josephine and passed along to Louise at some point. Some women’s costume experts suggest that the fullness of the skirt and the puffed sleeves indicate a date from the early 1930s (possibly inspired by costumes worn in the Joan Crawford Film, Letty Lynton in 1932). Further complicating a solid date, Lowe made dresses for the Lee family into the late 1940s (and possibly as late as the 1950s for Nell Lee Greening, Nell’s daughter) and the dress has not been discovered in family photographs so far. The dress was designed by Ann Lowe, although the exact date cannot be determined, although I would like to date it around the early 1920s as supported by the family’s oral history. The family’s accounts have been incredibly accurate as a whole.
3. “Yacht club fashions span 10 decades” St. Petersburg Times, April 30, 2004. Accessed August 13, 2011.
4. Howard Kurtz, Interview with Author, September 16, 2011.
107 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Oral Interviews: Apthorp, Joan. Interview with author, August 18, 2011. _____. Interview with author, September 2, 2011. _____. Interview with Author, September 10, 2011. Barron, Elizabeth Lee. Interview with author, January 19, 2012. Boushall, Eleanor. Interview with author, January 19, 2012. Carson, William. Interview with author, September 10, 2011. Copeland, Ann Bellah. Interview with author, November 2, 2011. Greening, Nell Lee. Interview with author, January 19, 2012. Kurtz, Howard. Interview with author, September 16, 2011.
Correspondence with Lowe's clients: Copeland, Ann Bellah. Letter to author, August 17, 2011. _____. E-mail to author, August 18, 2011. de Moray, Duchess Joan. E-mail to author, November 7, 2011. Huffines, Pickett. E-mail to author, August 24, 2011. O'Neil, Connie. E-mail to author, November 7, 2011. _____. E-mail to author, November 12, 2011.
Correspondence with relatives of Lowe's clients: Barron, Elizabeth Lee. E-mail to author, September 1, 2011. Boushall, Eleanor. E-mail to author, September 10, 2011.
Other Correspondence: CT Clip Licensing (CBS Television.) E-mail to author, July 13, 2011. Bryan, Elizabeth. E-mail to author. September 22, 2011. Hall, Elizabeth. E-mail to author, April 1, 2012.
Unpublished Documents: Alexander, Lois K. “Ann Lowe Obituary.” Unpublished news release, Metropolitan Museum of Art Curatorial File 1979.144, February 1981. _____. “Funeral Program Obituary, Ann Lowe.” Unpublished news release, Metropolitan Museum of Art Curatorial File, 1979.144, February 1981. Ann Lowe, doing business as Ann Lowe’s Gowns. Bankruptcy Docket United States District Court, 63 B 105 (1964). Hillwood Estate, Museum and Garden. Curatorial File: 51.156. Lowe, Ann. Letter to Mrs. Fred Johnston, March 1965. Collection of Elizabeth Lee Barron. Storz, Robert H. Letter to Ann Lowe, November 6, 1961. Collection of Durham Museum.
108 Public Records: Barbour County, Alabama Vital records information. http://www.vitalrec.com/al.html#State, accessed January 12, 2012. Hillsborough County Planning & Growth Management, Hillsorough County Historic Resources Survey Report Excerpt: Thonotasassa: Tampa, 1998. State of Alabama Department of Education. Annual Report of the Department of Education of the State of Alabama for the Scholastic Year Ending September 30, 1911. Montgomery, 1911. State of Alabama Department of Education. Literacy and Illiteracy in Alabama. Montgomery, 1914. Tampa City Directory, R.L. Polk and Co, 1919 – 1928. U.S. Bureau of Education. An Education Study of Alabama, 1919, No. 41. An Educational Study of Alabama, 1919. U.S. Department of the Interior, Tenth Census, 1880, Clayton Precinct 7, Barbour County, Alabama, s.v. “General Cole,” Ancestry.com, Ancestry.com. U.S. Department of the Interior, Twelfth Census, 1900, Clayton Precinct 7, Barbour County Alabama, s.v. “General Cole” Ancestry.com, Ancestry.com. U.S. Department of the Interior, Thirteenth Census, 1910, Dothan Ward 1, Houston County, Alabama, s.v. “D.C. Lee,” Ancestry.com, Ancestry.com. U.S. Department of the Interior, Thirteenth Census, 1910, Dothan Ward 3, Houston County, Alabama, s.v. “Lee Cone,” Ancestry.com, Ancestry.com. U.S. Department of the Interior, Fourteenth Census, 1920, Thonotosassa Precinct 32, Hillsboro County, Florida, s.v. “Dempsey C. Lee” Ancestry.com, Ancestry.com. U.S. Department of the Interior, Fourteenth Census, 1920, Tampa City, Hillsboro County, Florida, s.v. “Caleb West” Ancestry.com, Ancestry.com U.S. Department of the Interior, Fifteenth Census, 1930, Manhattan Enumeration District 31-520, District 22, New York, NY, s.v. “Caleb West, Tommie Mae Cole” Ancestry.com, Ancestry.com
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109 Newspaper and Magazine Articles, continued:
“Citation for Fashion Designer.” New York Amsterdam News, August 6, 1975. “Clothing: Slaughter on Seventh Avenue.” Time Magazine, March 12, 1973. “Clothing Needs of Debutantes Only as Extensive as Invitations.” New York Times, December 11, 1958. Congdon, Thomas. “Ann Lowe: Society's Best Kept Secret.” Saturday Evening Post, December 12, 1964, 74-78. De Borchgrave, Isabelle. Artist website. www.isabelledeborchgrave.com. Accessed February 15, 2012. De La Sablere, Noelie. “Paris Style Influences Strong for Silk.” Silk Journal, July 1912. “Deaths” New York Times, September 3, 1967. “Fashion Designer for the Elite.” Sepia Magazine, August 1966, 32-36. “Florida Citrus Hall of Fame-Lamarcus C. Edwards” http://floridacitrushalloffame.com/index.php/inductees/inductee- name/?ref_cID=89&bID=0&dd_asId=320, accessed September 25, 2011. Frye, Alexandra. “Fairy Princess Gowns Created by Tampa Designer for Queens in Gasparilla’s Golden Era.” Tampa Morning Tribune, February 7, 1965. “Gasparilla So it was Then.” Tampa Tribune, February 7, 1965. “Hear Stories of Tampa Pirates from their Queens.” South Tampa News and Tribune, January 19, 2011. http://www2.tbo.com/news/south- tampa/2011/Jan/19/STNEWSO8-hear-stories-of-tampa-pirates-from-their--ar- 214830 (accessed August 14, 2011). Holabird, Sally. “Ask Her About Jackie's Bridal Gown.” Oakland Tribune, August 7, 1966. Hooks, Theresa Fambro. Hooks' Line on Fashion. March 23, 1966. (accessed 8/14/11). “Inaugural Ball was a Brilliant Success,” Montgomery Advertiser, January 17, 1911. “In the Public Eye, More or Less, at the Present Moment. “New York Daily Tribune, September 24, 1911. Internet Movie Database, “Edith Head.” http://www.imdb.com/name/nm/0372128. Jet. Gerri Major's Society. October 12, 1967 (accessed 8/11/11). Jet. Leading Black Designer Ann Lowe Dies at 82. March 19, 1981. (accessed 8/11/11). Jet. Newest Fashion Rebels. Sept 21, 1967. (accessed 8/11/11). Jewish Women’s Archive. Jewish Women a Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. Sonia Rosenberg. http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/rosenberg-sophie-sonia (accessed 8/31/11). “Lovely Evening Gowns Worn.” Tampa Morning Tribune, February 6, 1924. Major, Gerrie. “Dean of American Designers.” Ebony (December 1966): 136-142. Moore, Booth. “In Fashion, the Brand Plays On.” Los Angeles Times, May 8, 2011. Mortimer, Lee. “New York Confidential.” Burlington Daily Times, December 14, 1960. “Mrs. Kennedy picks Inaugural Gown.” Chicago Tribune, December 13, 1961. New York Department of Commerce. Women’s Way with a Shop, New York: New York Department of Commerce, 1954. “Notables Attend Senator’s Wedding.” New York Times, September 13, 1953. Phipps, Betty. “Ann Cone Lowe: A Tampa Legacy is Honored in New York.” The Tampa Tribune, August 7, 1976.
110 Polk, Anita. “Anne (sic) Lowe...Designs 'One of a Kind'.” Call and Post, February 20, 1965. Reeder, Dorothy. Oral History. The Hillsborough County Public Memory Project. http://ww.thpl.org/thpl/history/memories/slice/Reeder.pdf/ “Reigning Queen of Gasparilla Becomes Bride.” Tampa Sunday Tribune, April 25, 1926. Robertson, Nan. “A Debutante Assembles Herself with Care.” New York Times, October 30, 1957. Russum, Marilyn. “Attendants in Cotillion-Like Gowns.” Omaha Evening World-Herald, October 21, 1961. Sandoval-Strausz, A.K., “Travelers, Strangers and Jim Crow: Law, Public Accommodations, and Civil Rights in America,” Law and History Review, Spring 2005, Vol 23, No.1. Scerzer, Amy. “Yacht Club Fashions Span 10 Decades.” St. Petersburg Times Online. April 30, 2004 http://sptimes.com/2004/04/30/news_pf/Citytimes/Yacht_club_fashions_s.shtml. (accessed 8/13/11). Sepia. Fashion Designer for the Elite. August 1966, 32-36. Sands, Lynn. “High Times.” Newsday, May 14, 1951. Smith, Ann. “Ann Lowe Couturier to the Rich and Famous.” Alabama Heritage 53 (1999): 6-15. Smith, Maria. “A Doll Dress for $1500.” Washington Post, June 10, 1965. (accessed 8/12/11). “Society.” Tampa Daily Times. January 1, 1917. “Society.” Vogue. April 15, 1936. Sones, Melissa. “Fashioned Exclusively at Ann Lowe's Gowns.” American Legacy 4 (1999): 30-39. St. Petersburg Times. Family Today. May 22, 1968 (accessed 6/15/11). “The ‘What About’ Contest.” Baltimore African-American. February 27, 1965. (accessed September 22, 2011). Warren, Virginia Lee. “For Debutantes: Bare Backs,” New York Times, November 16, 1967. “Will Go to New York.” Social Mirror, Tampa, Florida, November 1927. Wexler, Karen. “New Krewes, Old Questions.” St. Petersburg Times, February 1, 2002.
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111 Books, continued:
Baldt, Laura I. Clothing for Women: Selection, Design and Construction: A Practical Manual for School and Home. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippencott, 1919. Blaszczyk, Regina Lee. Producing Fashion: Commerce, Culture, and Consumers. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Coats, Lydia Trattles. American Dressmaking Step by Step. New York: The Pictorial Review Company, 1917. Hawes, Elizabeth. Fashion is Spinach. New York: Random House, 1938. Hewitt, Nancy A. Southern Discomfort: Women's Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s- 1920s. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Institute of Women’s Professional Relations, Proceedings of the American Fashion Design Conference April 23 and 24, 1941. New York: Institute of Women’s Professional Relations, 1941. Kidwell, Claudia. Cutting a Fashionable Fit: Dressmakers' Drafting Systems in the United States. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979. King, Wilma. The Essence of Liberty: Free Black Women During the Slave Era. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Johnson, Emory R., ed. The Negro Progress in Fifty Years. Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1913. Lambright, Edwin D. The Life and Exploits of Gasparilla Last of the Buccaneers: With the History of Ye Mystic Krewe of Gasparilla. Tampa, FL: Hillsboro Printing Company, 1936. McMillen, Sally Gregory. Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South. 2nd ed. Wheeling, IL: Harland Davidson, 2002. Metzner, Joan. “Clothes Line.” Miami News, May 5, 1966. (accessed 6/15/11). Milbank, Caroline Rennolds. Couture, the Great Designers. New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1985. _____. New York Fashion: The Evolution of American Style. New York: Abrams, 1989. Miller, Rosemary E. Threads of Time: The Fabric of History: Profiles of African American Dressmakers and Designers, 1850-2003. 2nd ed. Washington, DC: Toast and Strawberries Press, 2003. Pottker, Jan. Janet and Jackie: The Story of a Mother and Her Daughter, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001. Rhea, Mini. I was Jacqueline Kennedy’s Dressmaker. New York: Fleet Publishing Corporation, 1962. Riley, Benjamin Franklin. Alabama As It Is. Montgomery: Brown Printing Co. Taylor, S.T. Co. New York, Diagrams of New Skirts. New York, S.T. Taylor Co., Publishers, 1915. Trotter, Joe William, Earl Lewis, and Tera W. Hunter. African American Urban Experience: Perspectives from the Colonial Period to the Present. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Washington, Booker T. The Negro in Business. New York: AMS Press, 1971. Wilkerson, Tichi, Marcia Borie, Tichi Wilkerson, and Marcia Borie. The Hollywood Reporter: the golden years. New York City: Coward-Mccann, 1984.
112