Jackie Kennedy’s fairy-tale wedding was a nightmare for her African American dress designer

Ann Lowe was snubbed by the future first lady, who described her as ‘a colored dressmaker’ without naming her.

By Gillian Brockell August 28 at 4:57 PM

The 1953 wedding of Jacqueline Bouvier and then-Sen. John F. Kennedy was so perfect it is still being talked about more than 65 years later. As recently as 2017, gossip website The List was still calling it “the most beautiful wedding ever.” It was a fairy tale worthy of the legendary couple who would preside over Camelot.

But for Ann Lowe, who designed the bridal gown, it was a nightmare. First, the wedding dress was destroyed 10 days before the ceremony. Then the 24-year-old bride, who did not really like the gown in the first place, snubbed her.

Asked who made the dress, a viral tweet remembered this week, Jackie simply responded ”a colored dressmaker.”

Link to tweet

Ann Lowe was born and raised in Clayton, Ala. Her great-grandmother, an enslaved woman, had given birth to a child fathered by her white plantation owner. 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 leftover in their work, she told Ebony in 1966.

Her mother died when Lowe was only 16, leaving four ball gowns for the first lady of Alabama unfinished. Lowe completed the order.

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