Lowe and Behold

At the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, the long-undersung American designer Ann Lowe gets her biggest survey yet.

- MARLEY MARIUS

The September 1953 wedding of Jacqueline Lee Bouvier to Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy was a huge to-do. In the New York Times’s front-page report the following day, amid notes on the guest list (politicians from across the northeast; names like Vanderbilt and Gimbel) was a long description of Miss Bouvier’s splendid silk taffeta wedding dress, “made with a fitted bodice embellished with interwoven bands of tucking, finished with a portrait neckline, and a bouffant skirt.”

Left unidentified was the designer of that dress—and another 15 ensembles for the bridal party: Ann Lowe, who was nonetheless well-known within that rarefied milieu. “I’m an awful snob,” Lowe (circa 1898–1981) told Ebony magazine in 1966. “I do not cater to Mary and Sue. I sew for the families of the Social Register.”