EARLY BLACK HISTORY MONTH |

The African American Woman Behind Jackie Kennedy’s Wedding Dress

^{A self-described snob, Ann Lowe was an American couturier who designed dresses for women in the most elite circles of society.}

^{With a career spanning from the 1920s to the 1960s, she ran successful dress salons in New York City, created jobs within her community, and oversaw her own staff of African American seamstresses.}

^{She even designed for major luxury department stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. Several of her dresses are now held at the Met Costume Institute in New York. One of Lowe’s most famous creations manifested in the form of Jackie Kennedy’s wedding dress.}

^Voila:

^{When asked who made her dress, Jackie Kennedy said it was a “colored woman.”}

^{Oh, the snobby irony.}

^{At least today, we have a name to go with the dress, which is now housed in the permanent collection of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston (currently not on public display due to its fragile condition).}

^{Ann Lowe died on February 25, 1981, but continues to be remembered in the fashion community as a trailblazer for African American designers.}

FASHION WEEK |

Favorite street style looks from NYFW S/S 2027

LITERATURE | Analysis

Mrs Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf

…

1 the English social season lasted from about May to August and was when the upper classes and aristocracy gathered in the city (primarily London) to participate in social events, parties, balls, and gatherings.

2 *interjection my own.

3 to be presented in high society as a debutante of marriageable age.

^{Ellie Henderson inhabits a strange, new world.}

^{The world has begun to outgrow the values that helped shape Ellie and women like her; she also exists on the margins of the high society she wishes to belong to; even her own blood relations treat her like an afterthought.}

^{The poorer, modest cousin of the elegant Mrs. Dalloway, she arrives to this party in an old black dress covered with a shawl, only to be met with the sight of bare shoulders and the obscenity of ankles. Not the “lovely clothes” she had anticipated on seeing. Such laxity would’ve been unimaginable in her youth. Her reservations are far from unique, however.}

^{Social mores are changing, but respectable older people still consider the youthful/flapper style indecent. Yet, as Ellie Henderson notes, even the debutantes are tossing tradition out the window.}

^{We don’t ever get a detailed description of Ellie Henderson’s dress. In fact, her entire point-of-view narrative in Mrs Dalloway is less than two pages long. She’s a character sketch. More of an idea than a major player in the story.}

^{This is an attempt to fill in the blanks.}

^{Coming of age in the 1890s and early 1900s, Ellie’s generation would have worn clothes that looked something like these:}

^{Not an ankle in sight. Showing ankles in these days is associated with lower-class women and lax sexual morals.}

^{These assumptions are further upheld by the Victorian Dress Reform:}

^{“…reformists were largely middle-class women involved in the first wave of feminism in the Western world, from the 1850s through the 1890s. The movement emerged in the Progressive Era along with calls for temperance, women’s education, suffrage and moral purity. Dress reform called for emancipation from the ‘dictates of fashion,’ expressed a desire to ‘cover the limbs as well as the torso adequately,’ and promoted ‘rational dress’.[1]}

^{The movement primarily begins from health concerns and as a way to loosen extreme bodily restriction due to tight-fitting undergarments. In this way, women will actually be able to exercise.}

^{Reformists advocate not for the complete elimination of corsetry, no because that’s indecent, but they do advocate for a less structured version called a liberty bodice.}

^{The Victorian Dress Reform is one of many seeds that birth changes surrounding women’s bodies and clothing. As it is with any movement in history, modern women’s dress evolves from a convergence of factors: ideas that begin in the dress reform movement, textile innovations, trends in aesthetics, and shifting gender roles, especially after the First World War.}

^{Even before the war, there are signs of this coming change.}

^{France, the West’s fashion capital at this time, usually sets the trends. Beginning in 1889, Jeanne Margaine-Lacroix is thought to be the first established designer to create dresses with modified corsets. Her 1904 “Sylphide” dress replaces stays with built-in stretchy lining, and it is…quite the shock.}

^{Fast forward and it’s 1925. The flapper style officially breaks through as a trend. Certainly, no fashionable young woman at this time is wearing a traditional corset with her party dress. Instead, what’s underneath may be a soft, flexible girdle, a “bandeau” (breast flattener), or a simple chemise.}

^{French designers like Paul Poiret have been creating popular, corset-less clothes for elite clients long before the flappers come onto the scene, but it’s the flappers who most visibly dismiss restrictive corsetry from female fashion, and who raise skirt and gown hemlines with far greater cultural influence.}

^{This is where we find our hapless Ellie Henderson, smack dab in the middle of a major cultural shift.}

^{Bare shoulders, raised hems, dress silhouettes that exude boyish insouciance. The devastation from the First World War is still felt. Now, lots of young English people have adopted a kind of live now, deal with it later approach, not just when it comes to clothes.}

^{It’s the clothes that Ellie’s interested in looking at, and she doesn’t like what she’s seeing. Deep down, she must know they signal a dramatic change in the world. At the same time, she feels constrained, unable to explore fashion and experiment with her appearance. She’s distressed about her yearly income because it renders her poor in relation to the people in her ideal social set.}

^{It’s this disparity in status between her and the Cousin Dalloways of the world that results in Ellie’s lack of social ease and thus—I’m theorizing—an apparent lack of friendship and community in which she may have more confidently thrust herself into the zeitgeist of this time and place. It’s within the context of community that we often confront and evaluate new ideas and emerging norms, and gradually embody the moods out of which new fashions rise—not alone, but together.}

^{After all, older women, lower-class women worse off than Ellie, and traditionally conservative society women have been adopting a less covered, less structured aesthetic to varying degrees by 1925.}

^{Paul Poiret isn’t the only modern designer who’s revolutionizing women’s fashion either. Jeanne Lanvin introduces the Robe de Style in 1919 and it features a dropped waist and a full, voluminous skirt, which gets its shape from hoops and panniers. The Robe de Style doesn’t require a corset, but it’s more modestly structured. Later in the 20s, it’s considered the elegant, sophisticated alternative to the flappers’ skimpy dresses.}

^{As for Ellie, all we know is that she wears a shawl over an old black dress to her cousin’s party, suggesting that her look is old-fashioned. The fact that she’s several rungs lower than her cousin on the social ladder and is either unmarried or widowed adds further layers of pathos to this quick character sketch of Ellie Henderson.}

^{So perhaps the mention of the black dress is meant more as a literary device, an emblem of tragedy.}

^{And those who mourn wear black.}