Elizabeth Way Receives Publication Award
We're excited to announce that Ann Lowe: American Courtier by Elizabeth Way received the Costume Society of America's (CSA) 2024 Millia Davenport Publication Award. The work accompanied an exhibition of the same name at the Winterthur Museum, Garden
& Library from September 2023 to January 2024. As guest curator of Ann Lowe: American Couturier and editor of the publication, MFIT Associate Curator of Costume Elizabeth Way helped
to illuminate the life and work of Lowe, a consummate couturier who designed lavish
evening and bridal gowns for members of America's Social Registry. Lowe's long standing contributions to fashion were recognized late in her career
by national media such as the Saturday Evening Post, the Mike Douglass television show (1964), and Ebony magazine (1966).
Ann Lowe: American Couturier (Rizzoli, 2024) represents the writing of several scholars in fashion history, conservation, and fashion design, and illustrates how these fields intertwine around the groundbreaking Black designer Ann Lowe. Elizabeth Way began studying Ann Lowe and her exquisitely-crafted gowns in graduate school over a decade ago. At that time, Way met Margaret Powell, the preeminent Lowe researcher and the first to publish rigorous scholarship on the designer. Powell conceived of Winterthur's Lowe exhibition, but tragically passed in 2019. Thanks to the generosity of her family, the book contains Powell's biography of Lowe, tracing her from turn-of-the-century Alabama, to 1920s Tampa, Florida and on to New York City, where Lowe designed for America’s elite from the 1930s through the 1960s.
Another chapter gives insight into the important, but too often invisible, work of conservators. The beauty and intricate detail of Lowe's designs were brought to the forefront by Katherine Sahmel, Laura Mina, and Heather Hodge, who applied their expertise in fashion and textile conservation to mount Lowe's dresses for the exhibition. They insightfully document their methods and necessary stabilizations and repairs in the publication.
Katya Roelse, professor of fashion design at the University of Delaware, adds a unique scholarship-by-practice perspective to the existing body of Lowe research. She recreated Lowe's most famous gown—Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy's 1953 wedding dress—for the exhibition, documenting, stitch-by-stitch, Lowe's expert couture practices and processes.
Along with Elizabeth Way's chapters on Lowe and her contemporary resonance, this book is the most comprehensive academic work on this significant and impactful American fashion designer. Lowe continues to be a recurring subject in Way's curatorial work, and an Ann Lowe gown will be featured in the curator's upcoming exhibition Africa's Fashion Diaspora, opening at The Museum at FIT in September 2024.
Elizabeth Way is Associate Curator of Costume at The Museum at FIT and has curated/co-curated the exhibitions Black Fashion Designers (2016), Fabric in Fashion (2018), Head to Toe (2021), Fresh, Fly, and Fabulous: Fifty Years of Hip Hop Style (2023), and Food & Fashion (2023).
While the exhibition Ann Lowe: American Couturier is now closed at Winterthur, you can learn more about Ann Lowe by purchasing a copy of Ann Lowe: American Couturier or watch a video on YouTube from the symposium In the Legacy of Ann Lowe: Contemporary American Fashion Symposium where Elizabeth Way and the exhibition conservators discuss garment selection, research, conservation process, and mounting of the exhibition.