Both Lowe’s life as a designer and people’s general ignorance of it are proof that Black women are not seen—or heard.
No, you won’t be naming no buildings after me
My name will be misstated, surely
—Erykah Badu, A.D. 2000
Two items of clothing have made Jackie immortal.
The acid-pink bouclé-wool Chanel suit she wore on November 22, 1963, the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, became a symbol of her role at his side that day. Jackie purposely kept it on as she descended the stairs of Air Force One so that all the world could witness what had been done to her and “Jack.”
Fewer than a handful of people have seen the outfit in person since that fateful day. Fifty-seven years after the murder, the pink two-piece is stored uncleaned within an acid-free box in a climate-controlled room at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. After Jackie’s death in 1994, the outfit became the property of her daughter, Caroline Kennedy. In 2003, she donated the suit jacket along with the blouse, bloodstained stockings, and shoes—in her words—to “the people of America,” on the condition that it not be displayed publicly until 2103. Above all, the pink Chanel suit is stored in the nation’s collective memory and perhaps the entire world’s. Few people know that the suit was an American Chanel imitation, made with Parisian fabric and buttons at Chez Ninon, an atelier on Park Avenue in New York. Jackie insisted on promoting American fashion without denying her French taste. Not a real, authentic Chanel, but in a macabre way the copied two-piece contributes to the myth of two white fashion icons: Jackie and Coco.
Ten years before the suit was put away, on September 12, 1953, to be exact, Jackie wore the fairytale wedding dress made of forty-five yards of ivory white taffeta with trapunto embroidery and concentric circles. The dress, designed by Ann Lowe, was the centerpiece of thirty-six-year-old Senator John (known as “Jack” to friends) and twenty-four-year-old Jackie’s marriage, and symbolized their Hollywood-style fairytale wedding.
It has been copied thousands, if not millions, of times over the following sixty-seven years by wannabe-Jackies and women who saw their dreams shaped in the design. Its many photos led to the dress being stored in collective memory as one of the most iconic wedding dresses ever. But the Black designer, Ann Lowe, remained invisible and received no recognition for her design until her death in 1981.
This was not the first time she was overlooked. Earlier, in 1947, actress Olivia de Havilland dazzled in another design by Ann Lowe, when she received the Oscar for Best Actress—but the label in that dress read Sonia Rosenberg. Jackie, who liked simpler French fashion, wasn’t particularly fond of her wedding dress: the top emphasized her small chest, and she thought she looked like a lampshade. When asked who designed the dress, she replied nonchalantly, “A colored dressmaker did it.”
A century before the nameless, faceless, and unrecognized “colored dressmaker” Ann Lowe, there was another “colored dressmaker” who dressed first lady Mary Todd Lincoln and was equally invisible. Born in 1818, Elizabeth Keckley was the first Black woman to become the official White House dressmaker. In 1868, she published her autobiography, a slave narrative, entitled Behind the Scenes—or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House.
For each sub-theme, we are asking one author to be inspired to write a short story, essayistic musing or poem. If you’re participating, I’d like to ask you to write on the theme of “Black Beauty.” (In the exhibition, this is mainly about the position of Black women in the fashion industry, but of course you are completely free to choose your own path with the topic).
It’s March 2020 when I receive an email asking me to write a piece for the themed issue of De Gids inspired by the exhibition Black Fashion Matters. I beg your pardon? This was a pretty depoliticized title, it seemed to me. Black Lives Matter is about the ongoing violence against and murder of Black people, sometimes referred to as “slow genocide,” and I consider fashion to be a luxury concern (my activist self). And. Black Beauty, uugh? (ditto, and it reminds me of the horse). Why should I? (my rebellious self). No, I didn’t think so . . . I have little or nothing to do with fashion (my transverse, anarchic self). And: why only now, after some twenty years of being a writer? (my writerly ego). Because I am now suddenly fashionable as a Black writer? (my suspicious, activist self).
After not being seen for decades and not being asked, was it because I mainly performed spoken word and drama? Because literature doesn’t like to color outside the lines? Because my eclectic style doesn’t fit into the pigeonhole or fit with “us,” or simply clashes within the dominant narrative? Or just: because.
The editor who emailed me—coincidentally a former mentee of mine who has since become a gifted and reputable writer in Dutch literature—gingerly wrote back that the fashion activist who curated the exhibition, Janice Deul, had recommended me. I was also encouraged to have a conversation with the editor-in-chief—a proposal that sparked slight resistance at first, then anger and irritation. The editor-in-chief called, and I expressed my displeasure with the whiteness of De Gids—“calling in” is what it’s called, I recently found out thanks to Layla F. Saad’s Me and White Supremacy (but I’ve been doing it regularly for years). This editor-in-chief, for a change, was not hiding behind a mountain of white fragility or white exceptionalism, nor was he tone policing. He simply listened to what I had to say, and it even seemed as if he empathized with and understood some of my resistance. We entered into a conversation, and I relaxed and gave in. After George Floyd’s murder, the exhibition organizers realized that the original title would be better changed. The new title, Voices of Fashion, was convincing.
Empowering people and giving them the tools to find their own voice and speak out is my true calling. This former mentee, now editor, once credited me with helping her find her own voice.
After curator Janice Deul told me about Ann Lowe, I was totally convinced and said yes. However, this rested on the condition that my initial resistance could also shape the content. Preferably, I would write an essay.
In recent years, thanks to Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Gloria Wekker, and the work of visual artist Patricia Kaersenhout, among others, I’ve become increasingly aware of Black women’s invisibility.
Kaersenhout’s elaborately laid table installation Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Too? departs from Judy Chicago’s now canonical artwork The Dinner Party (1979), an ode to thirty-nine women from antiquity to the present, consisting mainly of American and European heroines. Patricia’s table is a social monument that makes visible thirty-eight women of color.
Black women from the African Diaspora are victims of anti-Black racism and sexism. I quote Layla F. Saad:
As Black women, we even have our own class of misogyny directed at us: misogynoir. A term coined by African American feminist scholar, writer, and activist Moya Bailey, misogynoir is defined as “the particular brand of hatred directed at black women in American visual and pop culture.” It is a term that describes the place where anti-Black racism and sexism meet, resulting in Black women facing oppression and marginalization under two systems of oppression—white supremacy and patriarchy. Misogynoir reflects the work that law professor, civil rights advocate, and pioneering scholar of critical race theory Kimberlé Crenshaw has led on intersectionality.
To put it in the context of Flanders and the Netherlands we can also quote from Nancy Jouwe in OneWorld:
Misogynoir is deeply rooted in Dutch culture, and it has very real consequences. Black women like Sabrine Ingabire, Seada Nourhussen, Clarice Gargard, the women from Dipsaus, Olave Nduwanje and Sylvana Simons are unfairly dismissed as Sapphires: too assertive, too aggressive, and too angry. This is a far too flat, limited and limiting portrayal of their humanity, which once again highlights the importance of self-representation. Why aren’t they allowed to decide how they portray themselves and give balanced perspective to harmful stereotypes?
I find the answer in Lowe and Keckley’s lives, where loyalty and allegiance to whites were priorities—and occasionally (partially) rewarded. Elizabeth Keckley was the enslaved seamstress who successfully dressed the first ladies of St. Louis. In 1850, her white half-sister decided that Elizabeth could free herself and her son for $1,200. Keckley succeeded in doing so in 1855. She wrote, “Free! The earth wore a brighter look and the very stars seemed to sing with joy. Yes, Free!”
In 1861, Keckley came to work in the White House (what’s in a name indeed . . .) for the wife of the president who would go on to free thousands of enslaved people with his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Before then, Keckley and Mary Lincoln’s paths had crossed once in St. Louis. But in Washington, Keckley’s dresses really caught the first lady’s eye.
The death of both their sons brought Mary and Elizabeth closer together, and the women became—as far as the spirit of the times permitted—close.
John Wilkes Booth made an attempt on Abraham Lincoln’s life on April 14, 1865, when he made his first public speech on civil rights for formerly enslaved people. On April 15, 1865, one day later, Lincoln died. After his death, Mary wanted “Lizabeth,” as she affectionately called Elizabeth, to join and support her when she was in mourning. Keckley stayed by her side at the White House for weeks and then traveled with her to Chicago.
A year after Lincoln’s death, Mary was deeply in debt. She wrote Elizabeth asking her to help her sell some of her clothing. That failed, but Elizabeth did not give up. She asked Frederick Douglass to participate in a fundraiser and wrote in her own name to prominent figures in the Black community to take up a collection at the church to benefit Mary Lincoln. When Elizabeth could not meet Mary’s needs, the friendship cooled.
After the publication of Keckley’s autobiography, in which she gave a detailed account of her life as an enslaved woman, her years in the White House and friendship with Mary, as well as the failed clothing sale, the friendship came to an end. Elizabeth had thought—very naively—that her book could restore her own honor and Mary’s. That, however, was thinking outside the unwritten laws and rules that governed race, class, and gender: Mary Lincoln felt betrayed and viewed the book as a violation of her privacy and social norms. The media aggressively attacked Keckley, and her book was used as an example of why Black women did not need an education. Behind the Scenes barely sold any copies.
In 1892, Keckley came to head the Department of Sewing and Domestic Science Arts at Wilberforce University in Ohio, where she trained young Black designers. Who they were, where they worked, and what they designed, history does not tell. Like Keckley (and Lowe), they were condemned to an invisible, unrecognized existence. Keckley died of a stroke in 1907 after a very remarkable life.
If I didn’t tell you about her here, you wouldn’t have heard about her anytime soon, if ever.
Keckley’s life story was far from exceptional, for a similar one unfolds a century later with, ironically enough, another political assassination of the first lady’s husband, this time with Ann Lowe in the role of dressmaker.
Ann Lowe, Jackie’s “colored dressmaker,” was known for her sophisticated stitching and floral embroidery, but her life’s journey was not exactly prosperous. She was born in Alabama in 1898, married at fourteen, became the mother of a son, and lost her mother—who also made clothes—when she was sixteen. At nineteen, she divorced and moved with her infant son to New York, where, in 1917, she became the first Black student to be admitted to The Design School, the prestigious fashion school at Taylor’s University, under a segregated policy that meant that she attended classes on her own, separated in a private, unheated room.
In 1953, when Joseph Kennedy, the father of Senator John F. Kennedy, meticulously orchestrated and directed his son’s wedding, including the design of his daughter-in-law’s dress, as one of the most important happenings of the year—read: an important step toward his son’s forthcoming presidency—Ann Lowe was given the prestigious task of dressing the bride, the mother of the bride, and thirteen more bridesmaids and relatives. The assignment did not come out of the blue; Lowe had been the regular seamstress and designer for the Bouvier (later Auchincloss) family for many years and in 1942 had designed the dress worn by Jackie’s mother for her second wedding, to Hugh D. Auchincloss, as well as the dress for Jackie Bouvier’s debut in high society as an eighteen-year-old.
Ann Lowe was described by The Saturday Evening Post as the family’s best kept secret in the Social Register. Like her mother and grandmother, she designed dresses for many first ladies of the first families of Montgomery, Alabama, along with other U.S. southern states and, after moving to New York, also dressed the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, and the Roosevelts. She described herself as “an awful snob” and said, “I love my clothes, and I’m particular about who wears them. I am not interested in sewing for cafe society or social climbers. I do not cater to Mary and Sue.” She prided herself on working for whites. Designing for the cream of American high society confirmed her status. From this, we can deduce that none of her clients looked like her, and Ann did not design for Black women. I quote Audre Lorde, who describes this self-hatred in Sister Outsider:
We do not love ourselves, therefore we cannot love each other. Because we see in each other’s face our own face [. . .] Every Black woman in america has survived several lifetimes of hatred, where even in the candy store cases of our childhood, little brown n****rbaby candies testified against us. We survived the wind-driven spittle on our child’s shoe and pink flesh-colored bandaids, attempted rapes on rooftops and the prodding fingers of the super’s boy, seeing our girlfriends blown to bits in Sunday School, and we absorbed that loathing as a natural state. We had to metabolize such hatred that our cells have learned to live upon it because we had to, or die of it.
Ann Lowe, consciously or unconsciously, thought she could safeguard herself from this self-hatred by focusing on designing and sewing exclusively for white women, just as her foremothers had done.
For Ann, the commission for Jackie’s wedding dress—plus the dress for the bride’s mother and thirteen other dresses—could mean the big deal: finally name, fame, renown, maybe even recognition . . . After eight weeks of sewing, however, disaster struck: a water pipe exploded in her studio. Ten days before the big Kennedy event, the wedding dress, along with all the other dresses, was destroyed. Lowe and her team worked day and night and, instead of making a profit, she spent money on getting everything done.
When she went to Rhode Island to deliver the dresses, she was ordered to enter the building through the side entrance, as had been customary for Blacks for many years. At that point, Lowe straightened her back and threatened to turn right around with dresses and all. Finally, with her head held high, she entered the building through the main entrance.
Then . . . at the end of Ann’s life, when she lived in poverty with sky-high debts and began losing her sight to stubborn cataracts, an anonymous donor showed up to pay off her debts. Everyone—including Ann—suggested in the press that this must have been Jackie, sure enough . . .
I’m sure the general public falls for this Snow White happy ending, but not me.
The lack of recognition for the Kennedy wedding gown design is not an isolated case. It is rife, a lifelong struggle that has everything to do with race and ancestry. Unlike Ann Lowe, her contemporaries, Christian Dior and Yves Saint Laurent, who also enjoyed Jackie’s acclaim, won their place on the honorary lists of fashion designers who changed the world with their designs, almost certainly for far into eternity.
Lowe’s grandmother was born into slavery, and her great-grandmother was the child of an enslaved woman and a plantation owner. What curriculum makes room for their story?
My mother is a Liberation Child. She is the granddaughter of a woman unknown to me (and her) who, I estimate, was also, like Ann Lowe, born in the mid-1890s in the south of the U.S. We never knew her or her son—my grandfather. As a Black U.S. Army soldier, he fought to liberate Flanders and went back to the U.S. in 1945 without knowing that my grandmother was pregnant. By immersing myself in Ann Lowe and Elizabeth Keckley, I am getting closer to my great-grandmother and an untold, hitherto unimportant, piece of history. Their stories are also about me, other women, and our daughters. Ultimately, they are also about you.
There is a big difference between descending from enslaved people who were sold for money and descending from the people who subjugated them, who set their price and sold them. It’s logical that both streams carry on for generations. It is therefore logical that our relationship with money and with profit and loss is different from that of white people. You may experience this differently, but to me there is a logical connection.
And a clear difference.
When I started this essay, I thought I had virtually nothing to do with haute couture, but during the research and writing I discovered how much influence fashion has on who we are and who we think we are. The four walls of my teenage room were covered from door to window and floor to ceiling with pages from Vogue and Elle—pasted over the wallpaper with Pritt Glue Pen. I knew names like Vanderbilt and Picasso thanks to perfume ads in fashion magazines long before I knew who they really were. Most of the models were blonde and white and anorexically thin, but suddenly there was African dark brown Khadija, labeled the Black Pearl on Yves Saint Laurent’s crown. Yves Saint Laurent, who died in 2008, had 90 percent of his fashion represented on the catwalk by Black women and had numerous Black and POC models like Iman, Dalma Callado and the late Katoucha Niane as his muses. He helped Naomi get her first French Vogue cover and so, for me, put Khadija on the map. I also bought the purple mascara and eyeshadow that Khadija wore. I looked in the mirror and saw myself as Khadija through the bright purple. She, along with Iman and Naomi, made me see myself in a more favorable light. Although I didn’t know then that they had to fight three times as hard to be on those catwalks and covers, to become so world-famous that they only needed their first names for recognition.
Role models write the first capital letter of your own story. Especially when the mainstream consists primarily of white women and men, streets and buildings are never named after women with your skin color, and the story of your ancestors is invariably skipped in history class.
Edson Sabajo and Guillaume Schmidt of the Patta shoe brand, buddies in Paradiso Amsterdam at the beginning of the century, are now my sons’ role models and heroes. Suleiman, Trabsini, and Osei of the Daily Paper brand, I learn from my kids, are now the new stars in the firmament. Black men of whom they are proud.
But where are the women of color in fashion? Aurora James, Marga Weimans, Pierre Davis . . . they exist.
It’s strange to realize that it has been three and a half centuries since a group of seamstresses in France first united in a guild in 1675 with the goal of standing up for equal rights for women in the fashion industry. Haute couture is still predominantly white and usually designed by gay white men. This has unconsciously provided visual—I hope—and certainly emancipatory benefit in terms of acceptance of androgynous, queer, and non-binary thinking/being. But the appreciation of round, voluptuous, and feminine forms has certainly been inhibited by it. And to what extent these powerful gay white men have contributed to greater acceptance of the LGBTI+ community, pioneering shapes, and color for menswear and for women remains unclear. What is clear, however, is that what Yves Saint Laurent has done for women amounts to his design of “the tuxedo” for women.
Why do we write and talk so little about the deeper impact of fashion? About both its emancipatory power and where it fails?
I return to what bell hooks wrote about white women and Black men: “White women and black men have it both ways. They can act as oppressors or be oppressed.” She points out exactly why being part of a minority does not necessarily exempt you from discrimination or from supremacist thinking about other minorities.
That Lowe and Keckley’s life stories, and those of many invisible Black women who came before and after them, were not seen or heard or told marks the difference between white and Black, male and female. Between white men, white women, Black men and Black women. Even though, when reading Keckley’s biography, I think: this is what Steve McQueen should have made a movie about. With all due respect to the film he made, Behind the Scenes—or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House is a story that opens up all the layers of capitalism that slavery bears and serves. But: Steve McQueen is a Black man (see bell hooks). But I also wonder: what would stop a Black man from doing what a white man managed before (see Yves Saint Laurent)?
Fashion has enormous influence; on that we agree. But how far does that influence extend? Although the beginning of the female body’s liberation is attributed to Rose Bertin, Marie Antoinette’s “Minister of Fashion,” Charles Frederick Worth, an Englishman working in Paris in 1858, who is considered the founder of haute couture. As of 2021, it appears that only 14 percent of major fashion brands are run by and/or bear the name of a woman, while a whopping 85 percent of the forty million workers who make clothing worldwide are women. Of course, most are Black or women of color, and on top of that, in most cases they are severely underpaid.
It is remarkable, after all, that both cooking and sewing are considered primarily female pursuits, but when “haute” comes before couture or cuisine, it is men who are in charge.
So, the great and powerful popes of fashion, with few exceptions, are all men and white, and happily gay—intersectionally speaking, therefore, still somewhat diverse. But given the dubious honor of having our own word—misogynoir—that names not being seen and being hated, it will be a long time before Black women, let alone Black queer or trans women, will be in charge in the fashion world.
“I’m free,” a Black man shouts three times in a row, and a gospel choir falls in. One Black model after another walks up a snow-white square catwalk. Women, men. All Black.
In beautiful dresses, suits, catsuits. Some brothers with so-called ghetto drag legs, sisters with wide round afro haircuts, a beautiful purple-black Nubian-looking woman with a colorful piano dress and a sister with a pitch-black headscarf and white cowboy boots. An androgynous Prince-like brother with straight relaxed hair, pink pants, and green cowboy boots. A yellow butterfly dress makes a sista shine, while the gospel choir sings on. In the audience, the faces of brothers and sisters who, with tears in their eyes, film people who look like them with their cell phones. Black Lives Matter in a fashion show. The songs of the choir sound more and more familiar to me until I realize they belong to my Black canon: “Where Do Broken Hearts Go” by Whitney, “Sweet Love” by Anita, “Proud Mary” by Tina, and “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” by Missy Elliott—so Black through and through, that I know many a white viewer may feel totally alienated by the last song. Perhaps it gives some idea of what continued exposure to the white Eurocentric canon feels like? This is Blackity Black Black, admittedly following an Afro-American canon, to which I feel connected by color, race, and blood.
That strange paradox between always being visible and constantly being invisible. Living and moving in a body that is always at risk in public space.
This fashion show is so Black that, as I write about it, I wonder how it will come across to whites. BEEP BEEP who’s got the keys to the jeep (wow) I can’t stand the rain against my window. BOOM BOOM. Entirely in keeping with the times, I’ll share the link, because what this fashion show demonstrates is beyond words for me.
No matter how many times I watch and re-watch: the recognition, acknowledgment and thrill remains. This is so about us; this is so about me. It is impossible to experience something like that at a white fashion show.
It’s like when Toni Morrison writes that Black literature, Black art is different, and then says: “jazz is the allegory, the parable.” That metaphor.
The fashion designer behind the show and the Pyer Moss brand, I later discover, is Kerby Jean-Raymond.
A Black man who dresses former first lady Michelle Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris.
