The New Yorker Magazine (№ 29th March 2021) by David Remnick (Editor In Chief)

Author:David Remnick (Editor In Chief) [Remnick, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: culture, politics, art, jounalism, magazine, non-fiction
Publisher: Conde Nast
Published: 2021-03-28T13:00:00+00:00

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An ethereal evening dress, in tones of pearl, with embroidered lace cutwork appliqués on the bodice and skirt.

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 29, 2021

47

courthouse. Around 1860, Cole bought

the freedom of his wife, a young woman

of mixed race: Georgia Thompkins, or

Tompkins—Lowe’s grandmother. Geor-

gia’s father owned the plantation where

she and her enslaved mother worked

as seamstresses.

Lowe’s mother, Jane, was born during

the Civil War. At some point during Re-

construction, she met Ann’s father, Jack

Lowe, of whom nothing is known. But

by the beginning of the twentieth cen-

tury Jane and Georgia had established

themselves as society dressmakers in

Montgomery, the state capital, catering

to political wives and daughters. Ann’s

education in the segregated schools of

Alabama would have been rudimentary,

and she dropped out at fourteen. But

her apprenticeship in the family busi-

ness trained her for one of the few vo-

cations by which a woman could sup-

port herself respectably. It also gave her

a rare example of female autonomy.

Lowe’s driving ambition, she told

Mike Douglas, as a guest on his

talk show in 1964, was “to prove that

a Negro can become a major dress de-

signer.” She cut the figure of one, bird-

like and soignée. Her uniform was an

exquisitely severe black suit or dress,

accessorized by a trademark hat, a taut

chignon, red lipstick, and dark glasses.

By then, Lowe was the tenacious sur-

vivor of a game in which most con-

testants get thrown o7 the island. Who

Lowe’s label advertised what one scholar called a “nostalgic ideal of femininity.”

now remembers Gustave Beer, a con-

temporary of Charles Frederick Worth?

the births, marriages, and deaths of house square. George Wallace, the in-What about posh Carolyne Roehm, a

African-Americans, not to mention famous segregationist, and his wife, fixture of the Reagan era? Does Bill their accomplishments. Several dozen Lurleen, who succeeded him as gover-Gaytten ring a bell? (He briefly re-

of Lowe’s dresses have been lovingly nor of Alabama, raised their family in placed John Galliano at Dior.) preserved—out of thousands. The fab-Clayton, and racial strife has a long

From early childhood, Lowe pos-

ric of her biography is an imperfect history there. On Election Day, 1874, sessed a transcendent self-confidence patchwork.

a white-supremacist mob carried out in her gifts. At five or six, she had started According to her own chronology, a violent coup in Barbour. Its members turning scraps of silk into the trompe-Lowe was born in Clayton, Alabama, murdered at least seven Black voters, l’oeil flowers that became her signature in 1898. In the census of 1910, however, and wounded scores, while routing hun-as a couturier. Her husband, she said,

she figures as a married woman of dreds of others at their polling places. forbade her to work—he wanted a stay-twenty-one, living with her first hus-

Having destroyed ballots already cast, at-home wife—and she obeyed him band, Lee Cone (his name has ubiq-the insurrectionists unseated a Recon-

for a while. But when her mother died,

uitously been reported as “Cohen”), a struction judge duly elected by a ma-in 1914, Ann was recalled to Mont-

tailor, in the town of Dothan, about

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