Only the Best by Kate Messner

Author:Kate Messner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC

“It was a chance to make all the lovely gowns I’d always dreamed of,” Ann said.

There were many seamstresses in town, but Mrs. Lee liked to tell her neighbors, “Nobody in Tampa can sew like Annie!” Soon, Ann was sewing gown after dazzling gown for Tampa’s high-society Gasparilla Festival.

“If you didn’t have a Gasparilla gown by Annie, you might as well stay home,” one of her clients said.

Fashion design was practically Ann’s whole life. She did get married as a teenager, though, and had a son, Arthur, who went with her when she moved to Tampa (he’s the little boy you see in the train scene). But her husband stayed behind, and their marriage didn’t last. Ann’s sense was that he knew her work would always come first, and he wouldn’t accept that. She had to choose between him and the dresses. She chose the dresses.

Once Ann established herself in New York City, she was able to earn a living during the hard times of the Great Depression and World War II by working for a number of different dress salons. She did her very best on every order, even though the other designers got the credit.

By 1950, Ann was ready to open the kind of salon she’d always dreamed of—Ann Lowe Gowns, on stylish Madison Avenue. She and her team of seamstresses sewed thousands of dresses for society families with names like Rockefeller, Roosevelt, and Vanderbilt—some of the wealthiest, most well-known families in America. “I love my clothes, and I’m particular about who wears them,” Ann said.

Many of Ann’s dresses were for debutantes—young women from wealthy families making their first formal appearances at extravagant balls. American society was still segregated by race and class then, so Ann was never invited. But she loved hearing later how her dresses were admired. “I like to hear about it—the oohs and ahs as they come into the ballroom,” she said. “Like when someone tells me, ‘The Ann Lowe dresses were doing all of the dancing at the cotillion last night.’ That’s what I like to hear.”

Ann used expensive fabrics from Paris and frosted her gowns with thousands of tiny glass beads to make them sparkle. Sometimes she didn’t charge enough to cover expenses, so she never got rich from her brilliant designs. Her joy was in the making, not the money, her granddaughter said. Ann’s granddaughter remembered her walking proudly through the streets of Harlem, with perfect posture and the most stylish clothes in town. “I want you to always walk with your head up,” Ann told her granddaughter. “You hold your head up high.”

When Ann died, in 1981, she left behind a legacy of beauty. Her elite dresses had crossed the stage at the Academy Awards, graced the pages of Vogue, and dazzled audiences at glamorous fashion shows.

Today, some of those high-society gowns are in the collections of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. It’s a wonderful place to visit if you’d like to see Ann’s beautiful gowns and her signature fabric flowers in person.

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