Ann Lowe

Ann Lowe designed the most famous wedding dress in American history — Jacqueline Bouvier's gown for her 1953 marriage to John F. Kennedy — but was not credited for the work because she was Black. For decades, the dress was attributed to "a colored dressmaker" if Lowe was mentioned at all. She was the first Black American to become a noted fashion designer, dressing high-society families for over four decades while fighting to receive recognition for her extraordinary talent.

Born in Clayton, Alabama, in 1898, Lowe came from a family of seamstresses — her grandmother had been an enslaved woman who sewed plantation clothing. Her mother was a skilled dressmaker who died when Ann was sixteen, leaving her to fulfill her mother's outstanding commissions. She finished them all. She later studied at the S.T. Taylor Design School in New York, the only Black student in the program.

Lowe's flower-embellished gowns were works of art — hand-sewn with thousands of individual fabric petals, each dress taking hundreds of hours to complete. She dressed the Rockefellers, the du Ponts, the Roosevelts, and other elite families. Yet she died in near-poverty in 1981 because she habitually undercharged for her work and absorbed material costs herself. A 2023 retrospective at the Winterthur Museum finally gave her the recognition she deserved — seven decades too late.