Ann Lowe: Celebrating An American Couturier With Elizabeth Way

I was introduced to society by a leading society woman. So many of the society women allowed their daughters to come to my shop and feel safe.”

Ann Lowe

Featured in MunaLuchi Bridal magazine, Issue No. 27, Contributing Fashion Editor Marie Deborah Smith’s conversation with The Museum at FIT’s Associate Curator, Elizabeth Way, uncovered more of the incredible and monumental story of American Hero and Fashion Icon: Ann Lowe.

The mysterious figure wearing her black glasses, sitting crowned with her black statement hat and all-black attire, silently staring into the camera was unknown to me. I somehow came across her while casually on the internet during my usual hobby of looking at former First Ladies and their fashions. My own journey of getting to know the story of Ann Lowe has been filled with astonishment, anger, and a season of pause and reflection on her legacy. She was known to many White socialites as their couturier of choice but seemingly a silent phantom in the broader exclusive world of fashion.

On December 24, 1964, during an eye-opening and absolute gem of an interview, host Mike Douglas asked the 65-year-old Lowe: “Why haven’t you received the recognition you deserve?”

Lowe responded using the choicest of words to say that her clients wanted to keep their Black couturier a private matter. She said they would only tell their closest friends. As I listened to her discreet response, she answered the way so many people of color have had to in order to not alienate and anger their White patrons. During the televised interview I saw how Lowe was able to navigate the world of White high society through her poise and tact. 

As an example of the erasure of her legacy, the media’s coverage of Jacqueline Lee Bouvier’s wedding to John Fitzgerald Kennedy never mentioned her, only The Washington Post’s fashion editor Nina Hyde published it. When in 1946 Olivia de Havilland accepted her Oscar, the gown’s name was given under the store from where it was purchased- Sonia Rosenberg, and not Ann Lowe. 

Born in Alabama in 1898, Lowe sewed dolls’ clothes and her own dresses.

She also dreamed of the creations by fashion designer Lucy Christiana, also known as Lady Duff-Gordon, and other Parisian designers. According to The Museum at FIT’s Associate Curator, Elizabeth Way, in the book, Black Designers in American Fashion, Lowe was, “One of the last Black American designers whose design acumen can be directly and positively traced back to the era of slavery”(p.42). At that time, “Designers weren’t just making garments but these were tools against racial oppression”(p.32).

With history stitched and woven into each of Lowe’s garments, the scholarly research and awe-inspiring storytelling of this truly American designer have been handed to Elizabeth Way, the guest curator of the upcoming 2023 exhibition, Ann Lowe: American Couturier, at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware. In this exclusive interview, we spoke about her journey as a curator and her hopes for the future, the upcoming exhibition, and the importance of more people of color entering into the career fields of fashion conservation and fashion journalism.

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• Exhibition: Ann Lowe: American Couturier
• Date: September 9, 2023–January 7, 2024
• Location: The Winterthur Museum in Delaware

The following interview has been edited lightly for clarity.

What does it mean to be a curator with your passion for fashion? What does that actually mean for you with this role?

So I think that different curators approach it differently. For me, it’s really about telling stories and creating narratives from objects. It always comes back to the objects, materials, and culture that we’ve been able to preserve in our collection and other collections, and using that to really create a connection to the past. Or the present. We show a lot of contemporary pieces too, but really using that object to tell a larger story. And that story revolves around fashion. But through fashion, we tell so many stories about history and gender and identity and sociology, economics – the list is endless. But for me, it’s really telling stories through objects.

For you as a curator, what would be your day-to-day duties and activities for your role?

So I spend some time in our collection with our objects. Not as much as I would like. So that’s the most, I think, curator-type thing that I do. But I do a lot of writing at the museum. At FIT, we serve the FIT students. So I work with graduate students who are learning about curatorialship in fashion. And then, we also have study classes and researchers come in, so I interact with them. So the day-to-day changes. We’re definitely working on exhibitions and books, but we’re also really focused on our students.

What is that emotional connection that you have to fashion? When did you realize that you were in love with design and fashion in general? Was that when you were a little girl or became a teenager? Can you just delve into that?

I think I first became interested in… I don’t remember when I first became interested in fashion, but I asked my mom for a subscription to Vogue when I was about maybe 11 or 12. And for over 20 years, I read Vogue cover to cover, every month. It was the highlight of my month, having that magazine come in and those images and so I was really taken by the everyday elegance of the fashion I saw, but also these fantastical, over-the-top pieces that I also saw.

Bringing those images together was really exciting for me. And in the early 2000s, there was some really interesting stuff going on in fashion. It’s a very loaded topic, but I’m Black and I’m Chinese. And I did start to see cultural engagement, looking at different parts of the world through fashion. Perhaps not in ways that we would… We can do it perhaps a little bit in more sophisticated, more inclusive ways today, but I really was captivated with different views of the world that were being portrayed in fashion at that time.

I still remember as a little girl watching the old ’60s,Bible epics, and some of those other classic historical dramas. For me as a little kid, I really didn’t put two and two together. I didn’t really know what that was, but I just felt like why aren’t people dressing like this? I mean, I just thought it was so wonderful. And like you said,  that fantastical world, that over-the-topness and the maximalism of it all. Seeing that maximalism. And for me, that’s how the connection started, just seeing the wonderful costumes.

I think the very first costume designer I ever found out about was Edith Head. I still remember learning about her and her background and how she was the costume designer for so many wonderful old Hollywood movies. And for me, that was my first foray into that whole world. So I totally understand with Vogue and seeing all those wonderful editorials. I get that. And just now going into your specific area of Ms. Ann Lowe. Can you just describe your research into her life in general?

Absolutely. I first came across Ann Lowe… first, I went to graduate school. I learned costume history, but she wasn’t in my curriculum. After I got an internship with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, that’s when I came across her. And this was before the building opened. So this was in 2012. So we worked in office space as the museum was actually being built.

But my project was to research the Black Fashion Museum collection, which is a wonderful museum that was started in the ’70s by Lois K Alexander in New York. And the collection is now with the Smithsonian. And so it was through that research that I came across Ann Lowe and another dressmaker, named Elizabeth Keckley. I was so interested that I ended up writing my master’s thesis on both of them. And I was able to go to different collections, including FIT, where I work now, and the Museum of the City of New York, and actually see her garments.

And they were so beautiful. So beautifully made.

I majored in apparel design in undergrad. And so I knew a little bit about sewing. Certainly not on the level of Ann Lowe or couturiers like that, but I knew enough to really recognize that this was really extraordinary work and that she was creating fashion that was elevated, that was high-end, and it was coming out of the US. And we don’t think about that. Especially in the ’50s and ’60s, it is all about Paris. And so I was really fascinated by her as a maker. And her designs were so beautiful and so in touch with what was happening in fashion in the 1950s and early ’60s.

So I dug more and more into her material culture in grad school. And then, through that research, I met a woman named Margaret Powell who is really the scholar…She, unfortunately, passed away much too young in the last few years, but she was really the scholar who put together Ann Lowe’s biography. So I looked at her material culture, but she really pieced together the facts of her life, which is… They’re amazing because she was this woman who was born at the end of the 19th Century in the Jim Crow South. And she just was able to take these skills that her grandmother, who had been enslaved, passed down to her mother, who passed it down to her, and take these skills of Black women and use them to transform her life in extraordinary ways. And so I was really captivated by that story.

Is there anything else that when you learned about her, it just affected you, maybe on a deeper emotional level that you might not have thought would’ve affected you?

Absolutely. What captivates me about Ann Lowe is that her mother and her grandmother instilled in her these skills and she used them. Her mother and grandmother were dressmakers. And by the end of her career, she was a fashion designer. And that was a new concept that was being developed in America over the course of her career. She really made a space for herself with that. She moved from Alabama to Florida, from Florida to New York. These are extraordinary moves for a woman, even today, but in the early 20th Century. And so I was really taken by the way that she could use her professional skills to change her life.

Do you think, especially with her and Elizabeth Keckley as well, was there something about just their air, maybe in the way they carried themselves and the way that they learned about that social world of the White upper class that allowed them to succeed more so than maybe even some other Black designers? Was it just the je ne sais quoi that they had rather than some of their other peers?

I think that was absolutely a skill that they had. I think that both of them, from what I’ve read, seemed to be elegant, lovely people. But I also think that interacting with elite White women, especially as a Black woman, is a skill that is also something they learned from their mothers and their grandmothers. To be able to navigate those relationships in just the right way to assert yourself as a professional, as a creative, but still give people the deference that they think they deserve. I think that was a very fine line. And so I think there were certainly things about both of their personalities that drew people to them. But I also think that those social graces were a skill that they learned.

How do you feel like you want to tell that story visually, especially with the mannequin choices, adding accessories or not, and through information cards? And the reason why I ask this is because there is a pretty famous story that Andre Leon Talley used to talk about when he was working at the Met. When he was there volunteering with Diana Vreeland and assisting her, when she would tell him about an exhibit that he needed to work on, she would talk about the story. She would tell the story. She wouldn’t just tell him, “Oh, just put this on a mannequin and you’re done.” No, she would say, “No. Cleopatra needs to be walking at night and we need to smell the perfumes,” and all this stuff. And just visually for you and especially what you’ve learned, how do you want to tell that story for visitors who come in and see the garments?

So for me in this exhibition, this is the largest exhibition on Ann Lowe and only the second that I am aware of that concentrated completely on her. The Black Fashion Museum did an exhibition on her in the ’80s. I really want to draw attention to the exquisite material culture.

The dress forms that we’re using, they’re actually being specially created through 3D printing with the University of Delaware. But they look like dress forms in a dressmaker shop. Because I wanted all these details to really go back to the fact that she was a couturier. Couture is not something we associate with American designers. And of course, this was running parallel to the rise of ready-to-wear, which is an amazing and unique thing about American fashion. But I really want to draw attention to the fact that this handcraft, this exquisite workmanship, artisanship was happening in the United States and that she was a master of it. 

So the pieces won’t be accessorized to highlight the style of the wearer, but really focused in so you look at the details of the clothing. And so even though we are using the exhibition text to tell her story, I do try and hope each one draws the viewer to look at the dress in front of them and look at the embroidery or the floral work or imagine all the layers that are creating that silhouette in front of you. Because she really was like an engineer, building these dresses from the inside out. So this particular exhibition is really focused on the objects and their material culture. There are so many different ways to approach every subject, but that’s my focus here.

If there is someone coming for the first time to the museum who may not even be aware of her and her story, or even fashion in general, what would you like for them to learn after they walk away from seeing this exhibition?

I mean, I want them to learn that Ann Lowe is an exemplary American fashion designer and that compared to the French, I don’t think Americans are as great as remembering their fashion designers in history, whether they are Black or White or male or female. But as a Black woman, she has an extraordinary life because of the challenges because of her race and her gender. But the story is that she was extremely important in contributing to the look of American fashion. The things that she made for elite women were photographed, they were circulated, and they were seen. And they helped shape fashion culture in this country and internationally. But I really want people to walk away with the idea that Ann Lowe was an important fashion designer who helped create the fashion that we all know and exist in today.

I remember the first time I found out about her especially as a woman of color, it saddened me. But then I was also joyful at the same time to see this woman who was able to navigate this world where a lot of us were not welcome and she was celebrated. And just knowing that her story is now being told, to me, she was also visually captivating even in the way she wore her hat. Those bold glasses. To me, that was something that was very iconic as well.

Now, pivoting to your story. I wanted to talk about your role. Why is it important for you, especially as a woman of color, to see more people of color in this career field? How important is it for more people of color to be entering into fashion conservation and fashion journalism? For me, sometimes I don’t see that. I’ll look at different documentaries and they show all of the curators and the fashion wardrobe conservationists, but I don’t see women who look like me. So how important is that for you to see more of us come into this field?

I mean, I think that if we want to create a more equitable world, if we want to create change, then we have to have people who have a vision of what the future could look like. And I’m not saying that those are always people of color or women, but I think that certainly helps. And I think that from just a very practical side if institutions want to do better, they need those perspectives. But from a personal level, I want to see subjects that interest me.

When I see movies, if there are no women, if there are no people of color, it’s hard for me to engage. It’s hard for me to be interested in it. And so as a person who is producing scholarship for the public, I want to produce something that interests me in the hope that other people, not just people who look like me, but everyone can see this is an interesting topic. This is something that is worthy of study, that is worthy of preserving because these are all pieces in museum collections.

And so I certainly want to reach out to people who look like me and people who don’t necessarily look like what’s represented in the mainstream and draw their attention and let them know they were a part of history as much as anyone else. But I also want to normalize this fashion content and think about it: Black people have always been here. Women have always been here. People of color have always been here. So let’s tell those stories so that we know that this was normal. It was normal then. And it’s normal now and it needs to be even more inclusive now.

Now for a person who is interested in your career field, what type of practical advice would you give them?

I think that if you wanted to move into the museum field, I think it’s important to engage in higher education that helps set you up for that. I went to graduate school. While I don’t believe that’s necessary, I think if you’re approaching your undergraduate education, it might be great to think about what pipelines, what professors are doing, what you want to be doing in the future, and tapping into those networks as early as you can.

You can intern at museums. I think museum work is sometimes… It’s definitely not as exciting as sometimes it makes it seem on TV or something. So get an internship, and figure it out. You might think you want to be a curator, but maybe you want to be a conservator or maybe you want to be a registrar. So like spend some time in those spaces and see what other jobs are adjacent to what you think you might want to do. So you can get an idea of how you want your future to pan out. How you want your day-to-day to look like.

So at FIT, we work with students, we field questions from the public. Reach out to people, ask questions. I don’t know of anyone in my field who would just ignore an email about someone interested. We want to help each other. We want to build networks. So yeah. Be curious and ask questions. Never be afraid to ask questions.

Now with your role, what has been the best career advice that you have received?

I was thinking about this when I was reading the questions and I’ve had a lot of career advice from people I’ve worked with, from our fabulous director, Dr. Valerie Steele. She always tells us an exhibition is not an essay on the wall. You have to tell a clear story. It has to be about the objects and you can’t overwhelm your viewer.

And that could be so frustrating because there are so many interesting bits and pieces that we want to convey, but you really have to pick and choose. Because I think we’ve all been to exhibitions where we’re like, “Oh, this is so much information. I can’t take it in anymore.” So I try really hard. I think that’s probably the best piece of advice. I try really hard to tell a clear and direct story that isn’t too overwhelming so that people do digest it and are able to walk away with… Even if it’s just a couple of little tidbits, I think that not overwhelming the audience is good.

How have you been able to overcome the fear of failure or even comparison in your role?

In a certain way, studying… My specialty is the intersection of African American culture and fashion, and I especially love the late 19th Century and early 20th Century. And when I was coming through grad school, there weren’t a lot of other people studying that. And so I was really able to distinguish myself because there were so few people working on this topic. I think that’s less true now. So I think that’s great. But I do think it’s important if you want to contribute to scholarship or if you want to be a curator, it’s great to find what is missing.

Fashion scholarship is a very new field compared to say literature or even history and there’s so many unexplored topics. So instead of maybe writing another paper about Chanel or about Christian Dior, maybe find something that hasn’t been covered. And then I think that you get so excited and there’s so much information out there. We definitely have not reached a level of saturation. So I was able to sidestep that competition naturally just because of what I happened to choose. But I do think it’s smart to think about how you want to position yourself so that you’re not necessarily covering something that is already being really well covered by a lot of scholars.

If you had a dream exhibition where you’re the head curator, what would the subject be and where would your dream location be?

The topic I’d love to explore is I want to do more about early Black dressmakers. I’ve done some work on it in the past. I’ve written about it, but actually finding those pieces of material culture and putting them in a room together and saying look at what Black women in America have been making for hundreds of years, I think that would be an exhibition that I would love to have.

Again, there are so many people, especially like me,  who are of the same frame of mind and think that fashion is art. And it’s just marvelous to be able to read your work and understand that these women have been able to tell their stories through these garments. And it’s just been a wonderful, visual story to be able to see from their work. So I just thank you so much. I really do appreciate this. And I was able to look at your symposium at FIT. It was fabulous.

One thing that you mentioned was there was a point where you said how most people recognized that Ann Lowe, if she would’ve been in Paris, would’ve been recognized as another Gabrielle Chanel. And that really sat with me. I had to sit with that for a few minutes because of just the work that has gone unrecognized for so long when she should have been up there with the giants in the fashion world.

But I just want to thank you personally for taking the time to do this and for all the hours of research that have come with this. So I just hope that this exhibition is huge. So thank you for this. Thank you very much.

Thank you so much. Really, it was so lovely speaking with you and sharing this with you. And I hope that when we open, you can come down to Delaware. Definitely let me know. And hopefully, I can take you through the exhibition in person.

Ann Lowe: American Couturier will be held from September 9, 2023–January 7, 2024, at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware.