The tiny photo is faded now, its round, silver frame chipped at the edges.

It’s a black and white keepsake from a different era: of paper dolls and playhouses, when little girls put on their grandmothers’ big hats and white gloves and earrings and had outdoor tea parties.

The image shows two little girls, one blond, one dark-haired, in bonnets and ribbons and ruffled dresses with their prized Terri Lee dolls, “the best-looking doll in the world,” sitting in front of a south Georgia pine.

The girls, Stella and Anne, are distant cousins – practically everybody in Cordele, Ga., in the 1940s and 50s with a Williams in the family was – but they call each other best friends.

“We’ve been friends since the cradle,” said Stella, the bonnet-clad blonde in the photo.

Stella, the flamboyant one, loved to dance and perform. Anne was a musician – she began on the piano at age 2 – and an artist.

“I don’t know how I actually passed school because I was always drawing when I should have been studying or paying attention,” she said.

One day, sitting near the piano in the living room of Anne’s house in Cordele, 10-year-old Anne sketched out her friend in a brilliant white wedding gown, her shoulder-length curls framing radiant blue eyes and white-gloved hands cradling a bouquet.

“An old-fashioned wedding gown, designed by Anne,” she wrote in a looping cursive. “Cost about $225. Any color. Designed especially for Miss Stella Jean Williams.”

In the years to come, wedding dresses “designed by Anne” would be coveted by brides all over the world, and Stella, ever vibrant and proud, would be there to celebrate every milestone in her friend’s rise to fame.

Where the story begins

The Anne Barge label is known worldwide in the bridal industry. Partly inspired by stars like Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly, who came to prominence during Anne’s childhood, the line is known for its classic, elegant look.

How it got that way is a story all its own, but it begins on a piano bench in Cordele, a farming and railroad town about 150 miles south of Atlanta. Anne’s mother, Ada, an accomplished pianist and organist, brought Anne along to dozens of weddings across south Georgia.

As her mother performed, Anne sat next to her, sketching the bridal gowns, fascinated by the pageantry of it all.

“Nothing affects a child like seeing somebody in a big, white dress with a long train and a veil,” Anne said. “It definitely spoke to me.”

She filled notebooks throughout her childhood, making sure to include the price and color options for each design:

“Getting married? On your wedding day, how about a simple but elegant dress designed for you – and only you – by Anne.”

In the summer of 1969, two weeks before graduating from UGA with an art education degree, she read in a newspaper that the country’s top bridal designer, Priscilla Kidder of Priscilla of Boston fame, was hosting a show in Atlanta. Anne showed up, notebooks in hand.

“I nearly got the brush-off when the receptionist discovered I wasn’t a prospective bride,” Anne told the Cordele Dispatch. 

Priscilla overheard the exchange and interviewed Anne on the spot. She told Anne her sketches were “very modern, feminine and completely different.”

“Imagine my surprise when she asked me when I could pack my bags to come to Boston to work,” Anne told the newspaper.

After a year in Boston, she returned to Atlanta to take a retail job with Rich’s. In 1981, she opened her own shop, Anne Barge for Brides, in a small house in Atlanta. 

Money was tight, so she lived in the basement of the shop for a while. 

She was still selling dresses designed by other people, making a few little tweaks to the neckline or fabric here and there, but a long way from her dream of launching her own line.

Stella, now married with two young boys and living in Calhoun, would come and spend the night with her in the basement of that little house in Buckhead. 

A prolific networker, career coach and wedding director, Stella told every bride she encountered about her friend Anne. Over the years, she speculates she sent “hundreds” of brides to Anne’s shop.

“I could never tell you how much that meant to me,” Anne said. “She almost had the people pre-sold, in many cases. Stella speaks with authority.”

Breaking through

Anne eventually sold the shop to Kleinfeld and moved to London to consult for Richard Branson’s Virgin Bride before taking on the full-time managing director role from 1996-99.

“And then my husband said ‘It’s time for you to live in Atlanta and just visit England rather than living in England and visiting Atlanta,’ ” Anne said, laughing. “He was right.”

One morning, Anne asked Stella to come down to Atlanta for lunch.

“I remember it vividly,” Stella said. “She pulled out this sketchbook with these beautiful sketches and she said ‘I want to start my own design business. What do you think?’ I said ‘Oh, Anne, I think that would be fabulous.’ ”

To launch a clothing line, you need more than just designs and ideas. You need factory contacts, fabric contacts, a photographer, models, advertising and customers.

Leaning on her industry connections, and using a little money her father left her and her husband Terry’s business acumen, Anne began the work.

In March 1999, she showed her fall line at New York Bridal Fashion Week. She told herself if 18 stores opened accounts, she’d move forward. Exactly 18 stores did. The Anne Barge line was born. Anne was 50 years old.

Anne’s dresses went on to draw international acclaim, featured on magazine covers and modeled by actresses like Meghan Markle and Kerry Washington.

“I wasn’t sure it was ever going to happen,” she said, “but it did. Most people would have given up by the time they were 50, but I knew where there was a will, there was a way. It just took me a while to get there.”

The road back to Athens

You have to travel a network of two-lane roads to get from Cordele to Athens, 160 miles away. Anne and Stella know the route well. 

Stella received two degrees from the College of Family and Consumer Sciences, just like her mother, a 1944 FACS grad.

Anne graduated from UGA in 1969, as did her mother in 1938. Her aunt, Jean Williams, an artist and faculty member in the UGA Lamar Dodd School of Art who had a profound influence on Anne, also is a UGA alumna.

The UGA connection played a big part in the early growth of the Anne Barge line. When “The Today Show Throws a Wedding” contest aired in 2003, viewers could vote on various aspects of the wedding, including one of Anne’s dresses.

Stella, then a member of the UGA alumni board, helped craft an email to the entire UGA alumni database encouraging them to vote for Anne. They did, apparently in record fashion, as host Katie Couric later told Anne. 

Her dress, “a regal white silk satin ball gown,” received the most votes in the history of the show.

“UGA came out on my behalf and rallied behind it,” Anne said. “It was great publicity and quite an elevation.”

In 2014, Anne sold the Anne Barge bridal line name to Shawne Jacobs, a longtime employee, and the label continues to grow.

At the Anne Barge 25th anniversary celebration in 2024 in New York, UGA Vice President for Development and Alumni Relations, Jill Walton, announced that the FACS historic clothing and textile collection used for teaching and research would be named for Anne in recognition of her significant gift to the university.

A photo from the event shows Anne smiling broadly, microphone in hand, flanked by four models in classic white gowns.

“It took a lot of patience, a lot of hard work, a lot of falling down and getting back up,” Anne said, reflecting on her career. “I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but I knew I was going to do it.”

Giving back

Anne also donated materials from her career, including childhood sketchbooks, photos, newspaper clippings and 33 wedding dresses, to the UGA Special Collections Libraries. 

FACS graduate student Noel Corbin curated the materials to create an exhibit, “Fashioning the Classic Bride: The Life and Career of Anne Barge,” hosted by the library from February-July 2026.

Her gift will provide support for both the collection’s preservation as well as resources for staff who oversee it.

“It will be a wonderful thing for students to learn from and see and touch,” Anne said.

When Anne visited FACS in February for the unveiling of signage in Barrow Hall reflecting the naming of the collection, Stella was there to greet her.

As they walked along, admiring the collection of items from Anne’s career, they laughed and hugged the length of the hallway.

“It was like we were just two giddy little girls again,” Stella said.

One item in particular, high atop a glass case, made them point and gasp: a framed image of a sketch Anne made back when she was a wide-eyed dreamer in Cordele.

It shows a blond girl in a white wedding gown with big blue eyes. In the bottom corner, in a loopy cursive, it reads “Designed especially for Miss Stella Jean Williams.”