Famous french fashion designer

Patrick Kelly Prince of Paris

A Mississippi homeboy is the first American designer to reach the top in Paris

Patrick Kelly moves like a brushfire in a brisk wind: cutting out pictures for an impromptu pair of Michael Jackson--Billie Holiday earrings; passing out his signature Black baby dolls; mugging playfully before the camera; and starting up half a dozen to-be-continued conversations. Today he is in New York, tomorrow Chicago and the day after that California. But he's just visiting. He lives in Paris where he designs and presents two major fashion collections a year, three if you count his holiday line. In between there are other requisite showings--on both sides of the Atlantic--as well as personal appearances, contests to judge and retail shops to visit. It ain't easy being Patrick Kelly, but apparently easy ain't what he's driving at.

Kelly's quirky vision of fashion has won him a choice listing of devotees, from Grace Jones to Bette Davis. It has been only four years since he retired his business of peddling his designs on the streets to form Patrick Kelly Paris.

In 1987 Kelly clinched a $5 million deal with the U.S. apparel company Warnaco, Inc. Now Warnaco backs and distributes his women's ready-to-wear line. Last year he became the first American designer ever to be inducted into Chambre Syndicale, the elite French fashion-industry union. With the honor comes a wealth of creative support and exposure, as well as the opportunity to unveil collections at the famed Louvre museum in Paris. Fellow members include Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld and Christian Lacroix.

Recently Kelly added to his spoils two licensing deals, one with Vogue Patterns and a second, with Streamline Industries, to sell his big colorful buttons. Mary Ann Wheaton, president of Patrick Kelly for Warnaco, says that within the next year or so the designer will likely ink deals for menswear, sunglasses and stocking and scarf lines, as well as a Patrick Kelly fragrance.

This day in New York, Kelly is still zooming from the joyous reception of his spring 1989 ready-to-wear line in Paris, but fatigue is beginning to set in. He yawns a lot. Just a few more business matters--like today's photo shoot and tomorrow's appearances in Chicago--and he can get on to his California vacation. That's two weeks poolside.

Kelly is not unaccustomed to hard work. But sometimes the toughest task has been keeping his spirits up. The road from Vicksburg, Mississippi, where he was born, to Paris, where he has his boutique and design studio, was not the smoothest route. There were times when he was homeless, evicted and hit by racism. But his stories, recounted in his bass-timbred drawl, reflect more his humor than his hardship.

Though the Parsons School of Design in New York City refers to his departure after one year as a "withdrawal from the program," Kelly shrugs and smiles and says, "They kind of got rid of me." He expresses mock exasperation about the time he lost his East Harlem apartment: "They Evicted my Black ass right into the street." That day he ran into model friend Pat Cleveland, who urged him to go to Paris. "Go to Paris?" he asked. "I don't even have a place where I can go take a bath!" When a one-way ticket to the City of Lights mysteriously arrived, he headed for the airport. His first night in Paris, he was at a party with model friend Toukie Smith, working the crowd. Somebody offered a job. He describes the interview: "They said, `You want to be a designer?' I said yes. They said, `Can you sew?' I said yes. They said, `Do you know Paris?' I said yes. `Do you know where to buy fabric here?' Yes. `Do you have a sewing machine?' Yes. `Do you have people to help you sew?' Yes, yes, yes," he assured them. "I didn't have shit, honey," he confides. "But I found out."

His designs reflect this humor, as well as a James Brown--like ability to put simple elements together, create something triple funky and make a hit with the people. Says fashion consultant Audrey Smaltz, president of the Ground Crew, "You have to have a good, strong personality, a joie de vivre, to wear his clothing." Not every Patrick Kelly garment is tight and stretchy, however. In fact, the line includes designs for a range of activities--from the diving board to the board room.

For all his kidding around, Kelly is known to be something of a workaholic. After creating a 150-to-200-piece collection (including accessories), he may go for days without sleep preparing for the big showing, then beat it back to the studio to take orders. Even when he's at a party, rocking and rotating, he may be preoccupied by an idea for a new design.

"I worry about driving the people who work for me crazy," Kelly confides. "I called my assistant Liz [Goodrum] back in Paris with a new idea. She said, `You just left one day ago!' So she hung up on me. She's been with me seven years. They call her my wife. We used to sell food on the streets [of Paris] to live. I called her back. She said, `Look, honey, get out of my life.'"

That Kelly is the first American to be voted into the Chambre Syndicale is somewhat ironic given the fact that his first impressions of the fashion world were of glamour and exclusion. He remembers a time when he was small, maybe 6 years old, and his grandmother brought home a fashion magazine from the folks whose house she cleaned. He marveled at the gloves and shoes and dresses but noticed there were no women of color modeling them. He asked his grandmother about it. She told him designers didn't have time to create for Black women. He vowed that he would. In junior high school he made dresses for neighborhood girls for their school dances and proms. In high school he expanded his enterprise to designing department-store windows and doing sketches for their newspaper ads. (Although his mother was a home-economics teacher, he taught himself to sew.)

After two years at Jackson State University, Kelly says, he was fed up with racism, Mississippi-style. It was the mid-seventies. He caught a Greyhound bus to Atlanta, the city "too busy to hate." He'd heard there was an Yves Saint Laurent boutique there. That he did not have a place to live, a job or much money did not weigh heavily on him. For a while, he says, he lived on the streets and worked for AMVETS, an American veterans' organization. He volunteered to decorate windows at the Yves Saint Laurent boutique and eventually got a paying job there. In his spare time, he sewed clothes, sometimes redoing used ones, and sold them on the streets. In New York he continued to work the street circuit while at Parsons, but after his run of bad luck, a ticket to Paris looked too good to pass up.

He carried on in Paris as the self-appointed prince of street fashion. His designs were guaranteed exposure as models flocked to him and wore his creations. Some things he gave away. People began to slip their orders under his door. But it was not until 1985 that Kelly made the quantum leap. He teamed up with a business partner, former photographers' representative Bjorn Amelan, to create Patrick Kelly Paris.

While he is clearly a success story now, some people have problems with the images Patrick Kelly has chosen to represent him. Some suggest that his oversize overalls and little nude brown baby-doll pins (he hands out 800 to 1,000 a month) give him a childlike image that is palatable to fashion's in-crowd and to an industry in which few African-Americans own their own houses. That perception was no doubt heightened, and perhaps was made more complex, by his recent introduction of a line of shopping bags and buttons featuring golliwogs (pickaninny-type faces). In fact there was so much advance pressure on Kelly concerning the bags that there are no plans to bring them to the United States. At this writing they were circulating only in Europe. Kelly, who collects Black dolls, including ones that predate the Black-Is-Beautiful era, reacts sharply to the criticism. He seems to feel that fear of being stereotyped can be more of a straitjacket than the stereotypes.

"You know why some people are hung up with them?" he asks, referring to the doll pins. "It's because they can't deal with themselves. Recently somebody Black told me they were harassed about wearing the Black baby-doll pin. And I thought, You can wear a machine gun or a camouflage war outfit and people think it's so chic, but you put a little Black-baby pin on and people attack you. I do these things so we don't forget each other. When Bette Davis gave David Letterman one on TV, then everybody wanted one. It was like, `Oh, this is the right thing to do.'"