She designed Jackie Kennedy's wedding gown but got no credit. Now, her story is being told

Her remarkable talent for decades was unknown to the wider public, but new books and a museum exhibition are spotlighting the life and work of couturier Ann Lowe as her Palm Beach connections also come to light.

For more than 50 years starting around 1915, the descendant of enslaved women who were seamstresses designed dresses and fairytale gowns for debutantes, society brides, actresses and heiresses.

Among them? Rockefellers, du Ponts and Roosevelts, not to mention the late Marjorie Merriweather Post, who for decades owned Mar-a-Lago, and Jacqueline Bouvier before she and future President John F. Kennedy made Palm Beach their regular getaway.

When Lowe suffered financial difficulties in the 1960s, a woman who later opened a Palm Beach fashion salon on Worth Avenue helped reenergize Lowe’s career and kept a record of it for posterity.

That would prove important because Lowe “often wasn’t credited for her designs,” Elizabeth Way, associate curator of costume at the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, told the Daily News. “Now she is getting the wider recognition she deserves.”

New biographies about Lowe have been published in the past year or two as her life and work is featured in a lavish exhibition at Delaware’s Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library.

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Open through Jan. 7, the Winterthur show is the largest exhibition to date of Lowe’s work, with 40 of the designer’s one-of-a-kind gowns — yards and yards of taffeta, satin, organdy and tulle embellished with hand-embroidery and silk flowers, among other details — including those for Post and Oscar-winning actress Olivia de Havilland, Florence Rumbough and Ann Bellah Copeland.

“So many of us turned to Ann Lowe for party dresses and coming-out (debutante) dresses. You could go to her, and she was lovely, and her work was reasonable and just exquisite,” Copeland, a former Northeasterner and Palm Beacher who now lives in West Palm Beach, told the Daily News on Wednesday while describing the 1964 wedding dress Lowe designed for her.

"I may be the the only person still alive who has a dress or dresses designed by her. Yes, she had eyesight difficulty later on, but overall, she did amazing work and that she is getting the attention she now deserves makes me so happy," said Copeland, a charity board member and co-author with Jane Foster of a book about Palm Beach.

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Lowe also designed Bouvier’s much-publicized 1953 wedding dress. A replica of it is on view because the original in the John F. Kennedy Library is too fragile to transport.

“With the recent resurgence in interest in Lowe, in part because of this exhibition, there is hope that more examples of Lowe’s work will be discovered,” said Way, a guest curator of the Winterthur show and lead author of a companion book about Lowe published by Rizzoli Electa.

Lowe, who died in 1981, was born in 1889 or 1898 (records aren’t clear) in Clayton, Alabama, to a family of skilled dressmakers, some of whom survived enslavement and established themselves as respected seamstresses.

They trained Lowe, who soon became known for her own talent. Her mother died in 1914, leaving unfinished ball gowns for Alabama’s then-first lady Elizabeth Kirkman-O’Neal. Lowe finished them.

Two years later, she became the live-in seamstress for Tampa heiress Josephine Lee, whose estate lent several gowns to the Winterthur exhibit, including an organdy-and-lace afternoon dress. Lowe became known in Tampa for her wedding dresses and fantastical high-society gowns worn to the city’s Gasparilla Festival. As she’d later say, “I do not cater to Mary and Sue. I sew for families of the Social Register.”

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Yearning to expand her skills and business, she moved to New York City in 1928 and, in the shadow of the Depression, slowly made connections, working under fashion manufacturers on commission and establishing her own ateliers with business ties to fashion shops.

“She constantly reinvented herself,” Way said.

One client with whom Lowe formed a close professional relationship during the 1940s: New York socialite Janet Auchincloss. She brought her daughters, Jaqueline and Lee Bouvier, to Lowe for their debutante gowns in 1947. In 1953, Lowe was commissioned to design Jacqueline’s wedding dress and bridal party gowns.

Then, disaster: Ten days before the Sept. 12 wedding in Newport, Rhode Island, a water pipe in Lowe’s atelier burst and ruined most of the dresses. “At first I screamed and cried and didn’t know what to do,” Lowe said later. “Then the only thing to do was to get to work.”

Lowe and her team worked around the clock to remake the dresses, including Bouvier’s silk taffeta masterpiece with a portrait neckline and round skirt with interwoven tucking bands and tiny flowers.

Lowe hand-delivered them to Newport the day before the wedding, which followed a Bouvier-Kennedy courtship said to have begun in Palm Beach, where the Kennedy family formerly owned a North Ocean Boulevard estate.

The wedding was widely publicized, but Lowe was not credited for the dresses. After JFK in 1960 became president and the family’s Palm Beach estate was dubbed the “Winter White House,” Jackie reportedly recalled her wedding dress had been made by “a colored woman dressmaker.”

While facing financial constraints in the early 1960s, Lowe reached out to the owners of a New York custom dress shop she’d called decades earlier but with whom she had not cemented a business relationship. The long-established shop, called Madeleine Couture, was then operated by Ione and Benjamin Stoddard of East Hampton, Long Island. Benjamin’s mother had previously owned the shop.

“From the moment Ann Lowe came to my parents, they knew she was special,” the Stoddards’ daughter, East Hampton resident and longtime Palm Beach winter visitor Sharman Peddy, told the Daily News.

The Stoddards were instrumental in helping Lowe and her career in many ways. They organized a major fashion show for her at the Berkshire Hotel in Manhattan, complete with a Champagne reception and runway models said to have include Mia Farrow.

Two television interviews in 1964 on the then-popular "Mike Douglas Show" were arranged for Lowe by the Stoddards, who also arranged for eye surgery Lowe needed in 1966, Peddy said. Two Lowe gowns designed for Ione Stoddard are in the Winterthur show.

After Madeleine Couture closed in New York and the Stoddards divorced, Ione Stoddard reopened Madeliene Couture in 1972 on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach. Lowe had retired by then. The new Madeliene Couture was short-lived and Ione Stoddard became an interior decorator.

In 2001, Stoddard married late longtime Palm Beacher Anthony Marston and the couple belonged to various clubs, including the Beach Club. “For decades, my mother (who died in 2017) maintained what we called a `treasure box’ of Ann Lowe’s sketches, news clips, old photos, (silk and cloth) flowers and much more,” said Peddy, who has spent years reaching out to scholars and others to share Lowe’s story and her mother’s connection to it.

Peddy donated her mother’s Lowe collection to the Winterthur for research and display related to the museum’s Ann Lowe exhibition.

“My mother always knew that one day Ann Lowe would be a significant part of not just American fashion history,” Peddy said, “but of American history.”

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: She designed Jackie Kennedy's wedding gown but got no credit.