The groom's father - the famously domineering Joseph Kennedy - was involved in every detail of wedding planning, including the dress, according to author Rosemary Reed Miller in a 2007 interview with NPR. In 1953, Lowe scored a major commission she was hired to create Jacqueline Bouvier's wedding dress, plus all of the gowns for the bridesmaids and the bride's mother.īy that point, Lowe had been working with the Bouviers for years, and she had a friendly relationship with 24-year-old Jackie, she later said. I'm not interested in sewing for cafe society or social climbers,' she said. 'I love my clothes, and I'm particular about who wears them. Lowe was proud of this distinction, telling Ebony she was 'an awful snob.' She was segregated from her classmates, but she excelled and graduated early.Īfter 10 years working in Florida, Lowe returned to New York, where she quickly became the go-to dress designer for the highest of high society - the Rockefellers, the Roosevelts, the du Ponts. Lowe completed the order.Īt 18, she shocked administrators at a New York fashion school when she showed up for class they hadn't realized they had admitted a black woman until that moment.

Her mother died when Lowe was 16, leaving four ballgowns for the first lady of Alabama unfinished. Her mother and grandmother were both seamstresses to wealthy Alabama elites, and as a child she amused herself by shaping cloth flowers out of the scraps from their work, she told Ebony in 1966. Her great-grandmother, an enslaved woman, had given birth to a child fathered by her white plantation owner. Ann Lowe was born and raised in Clayton, Alabama.

Fairy by C. Kennedy