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ONLY THE BEST by Kate Messner Kirkus Star

ONLY THE BEST

The Exceptional Life and Fashion of Ann Lowe

by Kate Messner & Margaret E. Powell ; illustrated by Erin K. Robinson

Pub Date: Oct. 18th, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4521-6160-0
Publisher: Chronicle Books

With flowers and fancy fabrics, Black fashion designer Ann Lowe created gowns for the rich and famous, breaking color barriers in dress design.

Messner and Powell chronicle Lowe’s story; from her Alabama childhood in a dressmaking family to a salon on New York City’s Madison Avenue, it’s a life of breaking racial barriers, where ugly incidents contrast with the soft fabrics, delicate lace, and sparkles. In New York in 1917, she took sewing lessons at the S.T. Taylor School but was forced to sew in a separate room, away from the White students. For years, her employers didn’t credit her work. Lowe is most famous for her dresses for Jacqueline Kennedy’s wedding, but even this climactic achievement is balanced with an account of confronting racism in her life—when Lowe arrived to deliver the dresses, she was told to use the back door but refused, threatening to take the gowns with her if she wasn’t allowed in through the front entrance. Fittingly, the final spread shows a triumphant Lowe with her own shop, where her name will appear on the labels as well as the door. Robinson’s digital art, full of textures, curves, and color, is perfectly suited to the subject, while Messner and Powell’s evocative, often alliterative text begs to be read aloud. (Powell had written her thesis on the designer and was in the process of organizing a museum exhibit of her gowns when she died.) (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A deserving tribute to a designer who wanted only the best.

(author’s note, quotations, bibliography) (Informational picture book. 5-10)