This follow-up post to my Women Dressing Women review spotlights certain women designers of color as well as work that uplifts traditionally overlooked groups.
Ann Lowe. I particularly wanted to highlight Ann Lowe (1898-1981), a Black woman who spent most of her design career working in a racially segregated United States, opening her first New York atelier in 1928. Lowe was born in 1898 in Clayton, Alabama into a family of prominent dressmakers (her grandmother who was a formerly enslaved dressmaker), from whom she learnt the craft at a professional level. From a Dressed: The History of Fashion November 14, 2023 podcast, I discovered that Lowe’s signature style included meticulous hand details such as beading, embroidery, hand applique and fussy-cutting (where motifs, often flowers, are cut from the print of a fabric, meticulously hand overcast or finished, then collaged together to create the embellishment onto the fabric). These couture techniques are particularly impressive in that Lowe would do them herself or in-house via members of her studio that she had trained, when French haute couture fashion houses might have outsourced such work to specialists.
The Ann Lowe dress included in Women Dressing Women (pictured on left) is an evening dress made around 1968 of white cotton organdy trimmed with a profusion of carnations in pink silk organza and green silk taffeta on the bottom half of the skirt. The gorgeous three-dimensional flowers blossoming off her creations are a Lowe trademark and can also be seen in two of her best-known creations: the American Beauty dress and the Jacqueline Kennedy wedding dress. At the time, Lowe was not credited with the design and construction of the Kennedy wedding gown, when outfitting the bride and bridesmaids for the wedding of the year, attended according to Life magazine by “600 diplomats, senators, and social figures,” should have been the ultimate professional triumph for a couturier. Not only was Lowe unsung, but she took a financial loss on the Kennedy wedding commission when a burst water pipe in her atelier ruined the bridal gown and nine bridesmaid dresses 10 days before the event. Lowe had to replace the fabrics and assemble an emergency seamstress team to reconstruct the dresses at her own expense.
Lowe has now been rediscovered, bringing long overdue attention to her groundbreaking work and righting a little of the historical record. A recent Ann Lowe exhibit at the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library in Delaware just closed in January 2024, but you can see pictures and video of the 40 iconic dresses featured here.
Vivienne Tam. Chinese American designer Vivienne Tam was born in China in 1957, but left at age three and grew up in Hong Kong where she observed the tumult of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-76) during her own formative years from across a border. Tam studied fashion at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University before moving to New York in 1981 and launching her eponymous label in 1982. As both an insider and outsider to mainland China, Tam’s spring/summer 1995 “Mao” collection explored Chinese propaganda and the cult of personality centered on Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic of China and chairman of the Chinese Communist Party from 1945-1976. In a collaboration with Chinese artist Zhang Hongtu, Tam checkered the “Mao” suit (shown on right) with black-and-white inversions of Mao Zedong’s official portrait, a giant version of which hangs in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, to symbolize (in her own words) “the positive and negative effects” of Mao on China. The jacket of the suit also resembles the Zhongshan suit, which is more commonly known as the Mao suit, having become identified with the person Mao. I particularly liked how, as constructed by Tam, the close cut of the jacket and the pairing with the miniskirt transformed the conservative Mao suit, a version of which was worn by the Chinese military and red guards during the Cultural Revolution, into a sleek and modern silhouette.
Tam’s 1995 “Mao” collection included other tongue-in-cheek images of Mao rendered by the same artist. Click here to see the multicolored “Mao” collection nylon dress featuring a checkerboard pattern of portraits of “Mao So Young” (with pigtails and in a red gingham dress with a frilled collar), “Ow Mao” (with a bee on his nose and against a black-and-yellow-striped background), “Holy Mao” (in a clerical collar), “Psycho Mao” (in dark round glasses), “Miss Mao” (with a smear of lipstick), and “Nice Day Mao” (a smiling face). These satirical images poked at the reverence Mao was still held in in 1995 and led to a backlash against Tam. Many factories refused to produce the “Mao” collection, some retailers decided not to display the clothes, and protesters threw stones at a window display in Tam’s Hong Kong store. I think the political messaging, first rendered through art and humor, then further conveyed through fashion, is powerful. The artist behind the Mao imagery incorporated in Tam’s collection, Zhang Hongtu, said it best. While the vivid colors of these Mao renditions instantly recalled Andy Warhol’s 1972 silkscreen of Mao, Zhang pointed out this difference: “Yes, Warhol just took the image of Mao as another mass icon, like Marilyn Monroe. But for Chinese artists, Mao is a political figure. I’ve been asked, ‘if Mao was a dictator like Hitler or Stalin, how can it be okay to use his image as pop art? Isn’t it tasteless to make fun of the suffering they caused?’ Good question. Mao is still controversial. Today, even if his deeds are criticized, the government still uses his ideologies, image, and flag. I believe that any use of Mao’s image which makes him less godlike is a form of criticism and it’s necessary.”
Jasmine Søe. Jasmine Søe, a Danish designer, established her brand Customiety in 2021. Customiety’s goal is to provide fashionable and accessible clothing to the often overlooked community of people with achondroplasia, or dwarfism. Using social media for feedback allows Søe to understand the community’s fashion desires and needs and to design in collaboration with them. Søe also worked with a tailor in Turkey to develop a size range and to introduce garments that the wearer can adjust and fit to their body without needing further tailored alterations after purchasing. I thought the straps along the neckline and ruching down the sides of the “Going Out” dress (pictured on left) were very cleverly done because they serve the purpose of adjustment and customizing fit while enhancing the garment’s look. At the Women Dressing Women exhibit, the “Going Out” dress was displayed on a mannequin for which Sinéad Burke, disability activist and director of Tilting the Lens, an advocacy group and consultancy that champions accessibility, equity and social justice, modeled.
Anifa Mvuemba. Anifa Mvuemba is a Kenyan-born American designer who founded her own label Hanifa in 2012, at the age of 21. After her New York runway debut was canceled as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, Mvuemba introduced her “Pink Label Congo” collection in an Instagram fashion show with each of the pieces “worn” by invisible models walking a virtual runway. The “Kinshasa” dress (shown on right ) was displayed in Women Dressing Women and references the collection’s dedication to African seamstresses by being constructed exclusively with the colors of the Congolese flag and alluding to the symbolic meanings for those shades: red for suffering, blue for peace, and yellow for hope. With its three primary colors, the “Kinshasa” dress seems simple, but I think that is a deception. Not only is the dress pleated all over, but the knife pleats emerge from a gathered neckline that wraps all the way around the wearer’s front, over the shoulders to across the waist in the back. Also in the back of the dress, the blue and yellow pleats meet each other on the diagonal.
At Women Dressing Women, an excerpt of Hanifa’s “Pink Label Congo” video presentation was played on a loop on a small screen by the “Kinshasa” dress. The full video is available on the Metropolitan Museum’s webpage for the exhibit as well as on Youtube and presents the full context for the “Pink Label Congo” collection. The almost 12-minute video opens with scenes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, showing its cities and people, the natural beauty of its countryside, and its diverse wildlife. Then, the words “IN THE HEART OF THE CONGO A WAR HAUNTS THE FUTURE OF THE PEOPLE” appear. We learn that rebels and child laborers in the Congo mine coltan, a little-heard-of mineral that is found in almost every cell phone, laptop and electronic device. Mvuemba then appears onscreen to introduce her label, Hanifa, and explain how she came to design a collection inspired by the Congo to shine a light on the exploitation of women and children there in the extraction of a conflict mineral used in all our electronic devices. Hanifa’s capsule collection then “walk” in digitally-rendered fashion the virtual runway, starting with the “Kinshasa” dress and followed by five other looks that I pulled side-by-side for this post’s cover picture. It’s pretty amazing that Mvuemba used her voice to tell us about a problem and to try to be a part of its solution and, when her originally planned runway show was canceled during the pandemic lockdown, she was not silenced and instead created this first of its kind presentation, showing her garments digitally animated by unseen bodies. Perhaps Hanifa has pioneered an exciting new show format for design entrepreneurs who lack the means to launch a full-scale live runway presentation?
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