An African-American woman is sitting next to a mannequin displaying a long, cream-colored dress with red carnations on its stems at the bottom, as if they were real. “Do you like it?” she asks, pointing to the flowered mannequin. That woman identifies herself as Linda Nixon. “My great-grandmother designed it,” she says, proud and happy.
The poster explains that this piece titled Evening Dress was made by Ann Lowe, who learned to sew with her mother, Janie Cole, and her grandmother, Georgia Thompkins. Her grandmother was a slave on an Alabama plantation. “She really liked flowers, especially gladioli, and she started making them when she was young,” clarifies the great-granddaughter.
Ann Lowe settled in Montgomery (capital of Alabama) and then in Tampa (Florida) where she gained fame as a dressmaker for the elite and the rich.
He eventually moved to New York. Working in this business as a black woman, during a time of racial segregation, meant facing many obstacles.
She was excluded from the history of fashion, until her work was vindicated, especially after it was recognized that she made Jacqueline Kennedy's wedding dress in 1953. Nixon says that her great-grandmother was already the dressmaker for the future first lady's mother. from the USA “I wasn't even born when she made the dress!” she exclaims. “But I know that my grandmother and my mother helped her because there was a lot of homework,” she clarifies.
The conversation takes place during the presentation at the Fashion Institute, belonging to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, of the exhibition Women dressing women, which opens this December 7. Ann Lowe is one of the 70 women, some highly celebrated and others unknown and now restored to their merits, who star in the exhibition in which more than 80 outfits celebrate the creativity and artistic legacy of these designers, since the beginning of the century. XX until today.
“We start from the spirit of recognition instead of seeing contrasts or similarities,” says Mellissa Huber, one of the curators. “We aspire to dispel the fact that women are more practical than men when designing or that they design with themselves in mind,” she clarifies.
“There is this idea that men design as if it were art and we want to refute this concept,” says Karen Van Godtsenhoven, the other curator. “This is a cliché that has been repeated and this journey shows that there are avant-garde designers, like Elsa Schiaparelli. We emphasize that there are many types of women designers and you cannot put them all in the same category or compare them as a whole to men,” she clarifies.
Compared clearly with the Met complex, this room, in the basement of the building, is like a dungeon, a dark place. This circumstance causes, however, that the artificial lighting enhances the color of the dresses on display, further highlighting their value.
At the beginning, there are black and white images of the workshops in which women line up behind the sewing machines and put the needle and thread to work. This is how this tour organized around four concepts begins. From “anonymity”, when they did not sign their designs, unlike men; to “visibility”, which starts like no other in France (Adèle Henriette Nigrin Fortuny): to “agencies”, which is the way of highlighting that they are already recognized (Gabrielle Chanel, Ana de Pombo, Miuccia Prada or Rei Kuwacubo); and a closing dedicated to “absences and omissions”, where the forgotten ones like Ann Lowe are highlighted.
“It's really a symbol of women's power,” says Max Hollein, director of the Met. “This is a critical representation of the creative work of women in an industry that has traditionally based its workforce on them, which allowed them to escape poverty and reach the top in the big fashion houses,” he adds.
The exhibition was planned for 2020, commemorating the centenary of the suffragettes in the US. Covid forced the delay. But the message seems even more necessary today. “We are still underestimated,” says Hillary Taymour, contemporary designer and author of the first wheelchair mannequin exhibited at the Institute. Her model accompanies her. “We designers promote femininity more,” she adds.
