The New York Blade
Buttons, bows & black realness
The brooklyn museum celebrates the legacy of designer patrick kelly
By DAVID NOH
Apr. 16, 2004
In the mid-‘80s, a comet named Patrick Kelly burst onto the Paris fashion scene.
In this pre-AIDS, hard-partying era, fashion was all about fun. Kelly upped the ante big-time with his joyous spirit, expressed through highly covetable clothes, trimmed with his signature bright buttons and bows.
These were modeled by his favorite, fabulous black divas: Pat Cleveland, Grace Jones, Toukie Smith, Gloria Burgess, Iman, Katouscha, Mounia and even a baby Naomi Campbell, whose funky ebullience revolutionized the Paris catwalks.
The Brooklyn Museum has mounted an entrancing retrospective on this Vicksburg, Miss., native, who produced collections from 1985 until his death from AIDS in 1990. He was just 35 when he died, but was the first American designer ever elected to Paris’ prestigious Chambre Syndicale du Prêt-à-Porter, which governs its ready-to-wear industry.
Like Josephine Baker and so many other black Americans before him, Kelly had to go to the City of Lights to find recognition. As he said, “The competition in New York is hard, and also, being black, being different, being a little bit weird, so I picked up all my being black, different and weird, and came to Paris and started making it here.”
Full disclosure: I had a hot minute with Patrick in New York before he went to Paris. We shared a love of the Paradise Garage and Japanese designers. From the beginning, his talent and charisma were obvious.
On my first trip to Paris, I had a number where to reach him (Paloma Picasso’s!), but he had obviously moved on from there by the time I hit town.
I was sitting at the Café Flore when I suddenly heard a familiar, rumbling voice call me. Patrick, it turned out, lived right around the corner, off Boulevard St. Germain.
The luck that always seemed to follow him, had found him the perfect 18th century flat, always filled with an exotic assortment of American models, musicians and random hangers-on. I recall Robert DeNiro once suddenly appearing there, taking in the wild scene in a glance, and then disappearing into thin air.
There was the night a drunken Grace Jones hollered from the courtyard below to be let up, waking the entire arondissement. It was the closest you could get to being a Paris expatriate in the ‘20s.
For all his success, Patrick remained very much the down-home guy —but a home life filled with cous-cous, jazz acts at Pompidou, precious stones and visits to Leroy Haynes’ Southern-cooking restaurant.
Patrick was still trying to make it the highly competitive, not to say cutthroat, world of Parisian high fashion. He was sick of being hired as a mere exotic boytoy by the likes of Claude Montana, and was running up garments for private clients — his model pals, disco devotees and one hugely fat cabaret singer, Militia. (“When God made Militia,” he’d mutter over his sewing machine, “he broke the mold.”)
Bill collectors were hounding him. I recall his excitement when he found some Issey Miyake fabric and Toukie Smith telling him, “You have to make your own statement!”
That he certainly did. Back in New York, Bette Davis appeared on David Letterman’s late-night talk show wearing a Patrick Kelly, whom she fully extolled on the air. The following day, Kelly was signed to a Warnaco contract, and his career really took off.
Thelma Golden, the Brooklyn Museum show’s curator, says, “Kelly was a real fashion innovator. He brought together that high-low sensibility and real creativity, but with a serious look, referential to the history of fashion, all in one.”
It was Kelly’s partner, Bjorn Amelan, who showed Golden his archive, which convinced her to do the show.
Besides Kelly’s rainbow-hued garments, the exhibit features his collection of black memorabilia — dolls, posters and advertisements — which could be deemed politically incorrect, but which Kelly fully embraced as important cultural representations.
The exhibit includes his trademark stretchy spandex dresses, with their whimsical trimmings, a red fox fur piece worn by Bette Midler on the cover of Vanity Fair, and photographs of her, Madonna and other Kelly celebrity devotees.
Along with treasured souvenirs of favored icons like Josephine Baker, Bette Davis and Billie Holliday, Kelly’s beaming, lushly handsome countenance is everywhere, on his ads, show invitations and a series of eight staggeringly elegant portraits by Horst. A video of his 1986 show runs continuously, a permanent record of the eye-popping joy of his runway.
When a rich client sniffed that his line unappetizingly reminded her of her maid, he replied, “My grandmother was a maid, and I am honoring her.”
Runway model Pat Cleveland says she Garage-like music in the exhibit makes her feel like dancing. Cleveland anonymously provided Kelly with his airline ticket to Paris. “Patrick was the personification of wishing come true. He once said, ‘I wish I could go to Paris. If only I could get there, I’m going to turn it out.’ I said, ‘Your wish is coming true.’ With his jeans and his spirit, he woke everybody up.”
A love of Josephine Baker, however, was really what brought the two together. Cleveland’s great aunt had been Baker’s Sunday School teacher and, when she first met Kelly, he asked her if she wanted to be in a Columbus Circle Coliseum hair show, as Josephine.
“He dressed me like her and we walked over there from my apartment and I got to dance like Josephine. We did it again in Paris, but with real bananas. That’s how real Patrick was. He gave to Paris a delicious box of chocolate goodies. All my girlfriends came out here for this, looking so divine. I feel like I’m in heaven!”
When He died in 1990, in Paris, he was at the height of his fame. He was only 35. Aside from a few classes at F.I.T., Kelly never received any formal training. He got his designs almost instinctually, absorbing the talents around him.
Kelly’s favorite designer was Andre Courreges, whose simple silhouettes, cleanness of line and eminent wearability were all echoed in his own clothes. He also admired Schiaparelli and the unstoppable creativity of Paco Rabanne, for whom he briefly worked, and the Parisian whimsy of those designers also made their way into his atelier.
Kelly’s own influence remains as a major inspiration to every young designer, particularly African Americans, who’ve been told “No” too many times. But it’s his brilliant sense of frivolity, that true chic so germane to the allure of fashion, that makes him immortal.
