Ann Lowe

Ann Cole Lowe stitched some of the most photographed gowns of the twentieth century without the public ever learning her name. Born in Clayton, Alabama, into a family of seamstresses who had dressed first ladies of the Confederacy, she was taking paying commissions at sixteen after her mother's sudden death. She trained in New York at the S.T. Taylor Design School — in a classroom partitioned so white students would not have to sit beside her — and by 1928 was running her own atelier. Her most famous commission was the ivory-silk portrait-neckline wedding dress worn by Jacqueline Bouvier in 1953; when a studio pipe burst ten days before the wedding, destroying the gown and ten bridesmaids' dresses, Lowe quietly re-made every one and absorbed the loss. Dubbed "society's best-kept secret" by the Saturday Evening Post in 1964, her gowns live today in the Met, the Smithsonian, and the Museum at FIT.

“I love my clothes and I'm particular about who wears them.”