Ann Lowe, known as “fashion’s best-kept secret,” dressed many of America’s most influential families.
American fashion’s “best-kept secret” is about to receive a major spotlight thanks to Serena Williams and Ruth Carter.
The tennis champion and the legendary costume designer are teaming up to produce a biopic about the late obscure fashion designer Ann Lowe.
While her name may not spark recognition among most, during her lifetime, she was responsible for dressing some of the country’s most prominent affluent families, including the Rockefeller, Roosevelt, Du Pont, and Whitney families.
Lowe, who hails from Clayton, Alabama, grew up in a family of seamstresses who had learned the skill during slavery and kept up the trade once slavery had ended.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Sony’s TriStar Pictures acquired a pitch for a project titled “The Dress.” The story will center around how Lowe, who managed to be the first Black woman to have her own shop on Madison Avenue, was also commissioned to design the wedding dress that Jackie O wore during her 1953 wedding to John F. Kennedy.
Williams and Caroline Currier will produce through Nine Two Six Productions, the production company Williams launched in 2023. Meanwhile, Carter will executive produce and is signed on as the film’s costume designer.
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The film’s screenplay, which will be written by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster, the writers behind the Mister Rogers movie “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” will be based on Piper Huguley’s novel “By Her Own Design.”
Not much was ever recorded about Lowe, though in recent years, historians and fashion industry insiders alike have begun to illuminate her story and her career which spanned 40 years.
In September 2023, the largest exhibition dedicated to her and her work opened at Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library in Delaware.
Elizabeth Way, associate curator at The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, wrote about Lowe in the Financial Times, “As a designer, Lowe was prolific and impactful. The women who wore her gowns were admired and in the public eye, inspiring wider trends. Most of her designs were for traditional events, yet within the conventions of these conservative occasions, she was innovative. Her work is meticulously crafted in an artisanal tradition handed down from an extraordinary lineage of Black American women.”
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