Reviews for By her own design : a novel of Ann Lowe, fashion designer to the social register
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From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.
When a pipe bursts in Ann Lowe's studio, she has less than a week to recreate Jacqueline Bouvier's wedding gown. This is not her first taste of hardship, though; she was raised by her seamstress mother and grandmother in Jim Crow–era Alabama, until she marries way too young and finds her way to Florida, where she begins to design for the wealthy women of Tampa. There, her patronesses raise money to send her to design school in New York, and eventually she opens her own shop, first in Harlem, then further down Lexington Avenue, where her white clients are more likely to visit. Huguley's historically sound fictionalization of Lowe's life is long overdue: she is the forgotten Black woman who designed for the social register from the 1920s through the 1960s. Huguley tells the story with lots of genuine heart, from the birth of Ann's beloved son to her time in design school, where she was forced to learn in racially segregated isolation, literally in a closet. Ann's personality leaps off the page, as does her design philosophy of following the lines of a woman's body. This important, page-turning novel belongs in all historical fiction collections, and will be a good fit for book groups as well.
