Ann Lowe

Lowe made the silk taffeta gown Jacqueline Bouvier wore to marry John F. Kennedy in 1953, along with the dresses for the entire bridal party, and the press referred to her only as "a colored dressmaker." When a flood in her workroom ruined most of the dresses shortly before the wedding, she and a team of seamstresses remade them in days. Raised in a family of Alabama dressmakers, she opened Ann Lowe's Gowns in New York in 1950 and dressed debutantes and society brides for decades. A 2016 biography and a Winterthur Museum exhibition have since put her name back on the work.