The Black designer Ann Lowe, who designed from the 1920s through the 1960s for high society families like the Carnegies, Marjorie Merriweather Post, and even Jacqueline Kennedy’s wedding dress when she married John F. Kennedy, is known as “society’s best kept secret.” Lowe was rarely credited for her work, which spans 40 years of designing for some of the country’s most elite and prominent families.
When the exhibition “Ann Lowe: American Couturier” opens at Winterthur Museum, Library, and Garden in Delaware on Saturday, Sept. 9, Lowe will finally get her long overdue credit.
Guest curated by Elizabeth Way, the associate curator at The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, the exhibition will be the largest on Lowe to date. Viewers will get the chance to see 40 different pieces by the couturier that span the four decades of her career, many of them on public display for the first time.
“When you see each dress in detail, you get this immediate impression of how elegant and how feminine and fashionable these silhouettes were,” Way told Women’s Wear Daily (WWD). “But when you look close, you start to see all these little details pop out at you, so it’s really a multilayered experience. And to be in the gallery and surrounded by all of them at the same time is actually very special.”
Speaking with WWD further about the exhibition, Way said renewed interest in Black history, particularly history that’s been obscured, has led to an uptick in interest in Black “artists and creatives of all kinds.”
In addition to guest curating the exhibition, Way also wrote an exhibition book of the same title. She has been a part of the small but impactful camp shedding light on Lowe’s legacy, which began in Alabama, roughly around 1898, where the future designer grew up in a family of seamstresses. Despite her grandmother having been enslaved, she managed to create…
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