You might have caught one of the retrospectives of Vicksburg, Mississippi designer Patrick Kelly at the de Young Museum in San Francisco or Brooklyn Museum in the last two decades—and lucky you if you did. Kelly sadly died of AIDS in 1990 at only 35, but the tragedy of that is in stark relief to his incredible achievements, not least of which was being the first American designer to be inducted into the Chambre Syndicale. How wonderful it would be to see that, and everything else about this great designer, honored onscreen.
Kelly landed in Atlanta in the 1970s, and his design work included upcycling—at a time when that phrase meant you were likely on a bike ascending a hill—before he was discovered by uber model Pat Cleveland, who told him he should move to New York (he did, in 1979), and if that didn’t work out, he should move to Paris (he did, in 1980). That leap across the Atlantic definitely worked out, with Kelly’s career rocketing skywards as he dressed Grace Jones, Madonna, Cicely Tyson, Gloria Steinem (she spoke at his funeral) and Bette Davis (check her out wearing Kelly on Letterman in April 1989) in his colorful, exuberant clothes, which owed some debt to his Southern upbringing.
Focusing on the all-too-short life of Kelly would be a powerful reminder of a Black designer who took on the then-hierarchical and moribund institution of Paris fashion and won. He espoused an inclusive approach to who he would dress, telling People magazine, “My message is: You’re beautiful just the way you are.” His Blackness was an incontrovertible and celebratory aspect of who he was as a designer, moving critic Robin Givhan to once comment: “Kelly was African-American, and that fact played prominently in his designs, in the way he presented them to the public, and in the way he engaged his audience. No other well-known fashion designer has been so inextricably linked to both his race and his culture. And no other designer was so purposeful in exploiting both.”
Barbara Hulanicki
John Minihan/Getty Images
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